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RUSKIN 

A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 

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RUSKIN 

A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 



BY 

ARTHUR CHRISTOPHER BENSON 

FELLOW OF MAGDALENE COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE 



". . . et VOX prima, quant audivi, tamquam tubae 
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To 
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Master of Magdalene College 

THIS BOOK 

is by his old friend and colleague 
respectfully and affectionately Dedicated 



NOTE 

My thanks and acknowledgments are due to Mr, 
Alexander Wedderbtirn, K.C., and Mr. E. T. Cook, 
not only for generous perfntssiott to reproduce copy- 
right material, but for many criticisms and sugges- 
tions; to Mr. Sydney C. Cockerell, Director of the 
Fitswilliam Museum at Cambridge, who has read the 
book in proof, and given ?ne kind advice and com- 
ment; to Professor Collingwood and Mrs. Meynell, 
for free permission to inake use of their respective 
volutnes ; to Mrs. Arthur Severn for approval and 
encouragement ; and to Mrs. Vincent for careful 
revision and criticism. 

A. C. B. 



PREFACE 

The following volume consists of seven lectures 
on the life and work of Ruskin, delivered in 
the Hall of Magdalene College, Cambridge, in 
the Michaelmas term of 19 lo. I had intended 
vaguely to recast them in a more formal shape ; 
not because they were not carefully compiled 
and composed, but because they were written 
as lectures to be heard, and not as a book to 
be read. But I found on reflection that this 
would entail rewriting the whole book on an 
entirely different scheme. Nor indeed do I think 
that another small biography of Ruskin is re- 
quired ; though a great and full biography of him 
is needed, and is being written, I understand, by 
Mr. E. T. Cook, the editor of the large standard 
series of Ruskin's complete works. The situation 
is, of course, at present somewhat complicated by 
nearness of view and considerations of personal 
intimacies ; but the time is not far off when we 
shall be able to realise what the ultimate effect 
of his work and message has been upon the world. 
I felt then that these lectures might, as lectures, 
have a certain freshness which they would lose if 



X PREFACE 

transmuted into a treatise ; and they must be 
looked upon rather as an attempt to emphasise 
and bring home certain saHent features and char- 
acteristics of the man, than an attempt at syn- 
thesis and summary. This book is, accordingly, a 
sketch and not a finished portrait ; it is frankly 
compiled from accessible sources ; but it is 
written with a sincere love and admiration, and 
with a strong belief that Ruskin's message and 
example have a very real truth and strength 
of their own, urgently needed in these hasty 
and impulsive days. It would be absurd to say 
that the fame and name of Ruskin are eclipsed, 
but his works have passed into that region of 
deferential acceptance, in which they are more re- 
spected than examined, and more reverenced than 
read ; and this state of things I earnestly desire 
to alter. I have written these pages, then, with 
the hope of provoking a discriminating interest in 
the man's life and work, and with the wish to 
present a picture of one of the most suggestive 
thinkers, the most beautiful writers, and the 
most vivid personalities of the last generation. 

ARTHUR C. BENSON. 

The Old Lodge, 
Magdalene College, Cambridge. 
Feb. 17, 191 1. 



\ RUSKIN: A STUDY IN 

I PERSONALITY 



LECTURE I 



Before I begin to speak of the life and work of 
Ruskin, I must suggest to you a few books which 
it would be an advantage to you to read, or at all 
events to glance at. /Kuskin's was a long life, full 
of work and energy/and moreover he came into 
contact with many very prominent and active 
persons, to whom I shall be bound to allude. It 
will therefore be difficult for you to follow the 
drama of his life without knowing something about 
the people with whom he came into close touch. 

There is an admirable life of Ruskin by Pro- 
fessor Collingwood, from which I shall have 
occasion to quote, and to which I am much 
indebted. Professor Collingwood was Ruskin's 
secretary for some years. The life is both faithful 
and picturesque, and much enriched by appro- 
priate quotations, though much material, now 

A 



2 RUSKIN 

accessible, was not then available. But the effect 
of Ruskin was so overpowering upon his imme- 
diate circle, that Professor Collingwood, in his 
devotion and piety, and with the memory of his 
hero so fresh and vivid in his mind, could not 
possibly be frankly critical. The book is certainly 
by far the best existing study of Ruskin's life and 
personality, and my debt to it, throughout all 
the biographical part of these lectures, is obvious 
and great. 

Then there is a stimulating and suggestive 
monograph by Mr. Frederic Harrison in the Men 
of Letters series. Mr. Harrison combines an in- 
tense admiration for Ruskin with a power of clear- 
sighted and judicious criticism. The only point 
about the volume which does not seem to me 
wholly satisfactory is its scale and proportion. 
But of course this is a matter of individual taste 
and judgment, and the book undoubtedly contains 
the best critical estimate of Ruskin, and is very 
just and illuminating. 

Then there is a charming sketch of the intimate 
side of Ruskin's personality, by Lady Ritchie, 
Thackeray's daughter, in a little volume called 
Tennyson, Ruskin and Browning. 

There is a readable book called Ruskin and his 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 3 

Circle, by Miss Earland, which furnishes a good 
background for the life. 

There is also a little book in the Modern English 
Writers series, by Mrs. Meynell, which gives an 
able and judicious summary of Ruskin's principal 
writings. The book is highly concentrated, and 
the style, which maintains a high level of literary 
beauty, is almost inevitably allusive and even 
intricate. I would warmly recommend the book 
to any one who wishes to grasp the drift and 
inner spirit of Ruskin's writings. And I would 
here express my own sense of high obligation 
to the volume, for the guidance which, in its 
fine suggestiveness, it has afiforded me. 

Of course I need hardly say that to get any 
real conception of the scope of Ruskin's work, 
it is advisable to read some of his own books. 
I can hardly expect that many of my hearers 
will work faithfully through the great edition in 
thirty-seven volumes. It is a monumental work, 
full of exact information and elaborate refer- 
ences ; the introductions are admirably written, 
and the pictorial illustrations are excellent. But 
fortunately most of the best- known works are 
available in cheaper and lighter editions. And 
so I would ask my hearers to read if possible the 



4 RUSKIN 

Prceterita of Ruskin, one of the most beautiful 
books in the EngHsh language, an autobiography 
which he never finished. 

I would also ask you to read Sesame and Lilies, 
a book about books, which gives a fine example 
of his style and of his thought. And those who 
wish to get an idea of Ruskin's economical 
theories must carefully read his book, Unto this Last, 
without which it is impossible to understand his 
principles. And further, any one who is interested 
in his artistic ideas might find it possible to read 
the little shilling book published by George Allen 
— The Nature of Gothic — which is a chapter out of 
The Stones of Venice, and has the immense ad- 
vantage of having a short preface by William 
Morris, which emphasises both forcibly and beauti- 
fully the strong points in Ruskin's art-teaching. 
Of course I hope that those who get so far will be 
inclined to go further afield ; because lectures like 
these are not intended to give a substitute for 
Ruskin, in a tabloid form, but to act if possible 
as an invitation to study the man's own heart 
and mind ; for no one ever gave so prodigally 
of both to his readers as Ruskin did, or, as the 
old text says, so laid his "body as the ground, 
and as the street, to them that went over." 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 



■/john Ruskin was born at 54, Hunter Street, 
Brunswick Square, on the 8th of February 1819^''' 
You may pass the house any day driving wesi 
from St. Pancras or King's Cross. The street is 
a semi-respectable one ; parts of it are sordid and 
poverty-stricken, but as it draws near to Bruns- 
wick Square it settles down to a drab and dingy 
decorum, very characteristic of our great metro- 
polis ; and the house itself is precisely and typi- 
cally the very house in which you would not 
expect so rare a flower of genius to bloom, and 
least of all adapted to nurture a passionate lover 
of beauty. But I never pass the place without 
a thrill of pleasure that there should have been 
born just there, on that particular spot of the earth 
and no other, where the sooty yellow-brick geo- 
metrical house-fronts rise into the smoke-stained 
skies of London, one who was to love so intensely 
the earth and all that grows out of the earth, and 
lies hid in it — both its hills and forests, its plains 
and lakes, as well as its trees and flowers, its rocks 
and mineral forms — and not only these ; for the 
child that was born in that unlovely street was to 



6 RUSKIN 

love, with the kind of love that most men reserve 
for mistress or child, the stately cities of the v^'orld 
their churches and palaces, their fafades and 
columns ; and not only to love them and grieve 
over their ruin and restoration alike, but to inter- 
pret their loveliness to others, and multiply that 
sense of beauty a thousandfold. 

That house is now distinguished from the rest 
by a tablet, a disc like the top of a chocolate 
birthday-cake, with a record meanly written. I 
am glad too that it should be so ugly and sensible 
a halo. The worshippers of Ruskin might perhaps 
have put up some so-called appropriate design, — 
an angel holding on to a balustrade, or a Delia 
Robbia plaque, to be grimed and stained by 
London smoke. But I rejoice that when we build 
the sepulchre of a prophet to whom we would 
not listen, we should do it in our own solid and 
commercial spirit, reckoning his reputation as a 
national asset, and grudging him to other nations, 
not because we prize his sweet and noble spirit, 
but because he brings money and credit into the 
country ; just as the townsmen of Assisi hurried 
St. Francis home that he might die there, not 
because they could not bear that others should 
see his pain, or for love of his parting smiles, but 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 7 

because they wanted to have authentic miracles 
of their own. 

'The father of John Raskin was a man of sterling 
virtue, an excellent man of business, a wine- 
merchant, as his father was before him. With 
this difference, that his father lost a fortune and 
died insolvent ; while the son not only paid his 
father's debts, but left a fortune of nearly two 
hundred thousand pounds. But he was not only 
'< an entirely honest merchant," as the inscription 
on his tomb runs ; he was also a man of taste 
and serious culture, a lover of good books and 
pictures and scenery, and transmitted to his son 
a deep and perfectly natural passion for beautiful 
things and beautiful thoughts. ArThe mother must 
be confessed to have been a grim figure, with an 
intense devotion to her home circle, and an un- 
concealed contempt for the sloppiness of people 
in general/ Ruskin gave many tender and humo- 
rous reminiscences of her in later life. He 
wrote once of her : " I don't think women were 
in general meant to reason. I never knew but 
one rational woman in my life, and that is my 
own mother (when one doesn't talk about actors 
or Mr, Gladstone, or anybody she has taken an 
antipathy to)." He recorded too that he had often 



8 RUSKIN 

seen his mother travelling from sunrise to sunset 
of a summer's day without ever leaning back in the 
carriage. And he wrote in Prceterita : " Whenever 
I did anything wrong or stupid or hard-hearted — 
and I have done many things that were all three 
— my mother always said, ' It is because you were 
too much indulged.' " 

Much that is tedious has been written about the 
origin of the family — tedious, because at present 
we know so little about heredity and descent. 
Some day, no doubt, when Mendelism and 
eugenics are perfected, we shall breed a genius 
as easily as we breed a greyhound. And doubt- 
less the secret of Ruskin's greatness is hidden 
safely enough in his austere pedigree. But there 
are one or two points of real interest about it. 
The name itself is of doubtful origin ; and it 
matters little whether it is the same word as 
Erskine, or a mere nickname, Roughskin, or 
whether it is a diminutive, meaning the little red 
man. But it falls under the law which seems to 
assign to English men of genius quaint, striking, 
or beautiful names — and this is especially true 
of great writers ; there is hardly a great Eng- 
lish writer who has not borne a seemly name. 

And then too there is another point. •'^Ruskin 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 9 

was the son of first cousins/ This is apt to pro- 
duce disasters of constitution, but it also produces 
greatness, for the simple reason that such an 
origin tends to accentuate and emphasise whatever 
qualities are there, by simple accumulation. If 
Ruskin owed to his birth the terrible mental 
collapse of his later life, it was perhaps the natural 
price he paid for his force and swiftness of spirit. 
And in this respect men of a later date, comfort- 
ably flattened out by eugenics into an even paste 
of virtue and efficiency, may look back with a 
romantic regret to the days when irregularities of 
temperament were made possible by our want of 
sense and knowledge. 

'*rhen, too, Ruskin was three parts Scotch, and 
what is more, Lowland Scotch. It cannot be 
mere chance that so many of our most forcible 
later writers, such as Carlyle and Walter Scott and 
Stevenson, have been sealed of the same tribe. 
I believe myself that the temperament of the Low- 
land Scotch is at once fiery and restrained, that it 
is naturally eloquent and emotional and religious, 
not sentimentally, but with a certain uplifted 
solemnity of heart ; and then too the Lowland 
Scotch vocabulary is a singularly rich and elastic 
one, with all the resources of English, and with 



lo RUSKIN 

many fine indigenous words. It is at least cer- 
tain, in Ruskin's case, that he owed much to his 
inflexible Biblical training, of which I will speak 
in detail later. One whose memory was so re- 
tentive, and whose ear for the music of words 
so sensitive, did indisputably gain an incredible 
mastery of cadence and serious rhetoric from the 
restrained economy and the noble passion of 
Scriptural traditions. To tell a story with austere 
simplicity and stately directness ; to be denun- 
ciatory without being abusive ; to be indignant 
without ever losing self-control ; not to be ashamed 
of deep and grand emotion ; never to deviate into 
commonness or verbiage — these were some of the 
things that Ruskin acquired from his Bible read- 
ing ; and this was a direct consequence of his 
Scotch descent. 

And lastly, I have always thought it a supreme 
blessing that by birth and family he touched both 
ends of the social scale. A Scotchman never 
loses a certain pride of birth, however menial his 
state may be. Ruskin could trace his descent to 
more than one baronial family — the blood of old 
Robin Adair ran in his veins ; but his grandmother 
kept an inn at Croydon ; his aunt was married to 
a baker of the same place ; his father's sister 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY ii 

married a tanner of Perth. I have a feeHng that 
Ruskin did not quite like the homeliness of these 
associations ; but with a fine sort of loyalty he 
not only did not disguise the facts, but put them 
prominently and literally forward. And it was 
perhaps the best point about his sheltered and 
secluded upbringing, that he was brought so 
closely into contact with simple people and lowly 
ways. It gave him an enormous power of making 
friendships rather than condescending alliances 
with servants and ordinary folk, and taught him 
to recognise that refined feeling and generous 
qualities are not the private property and the 
monopoly of well-to-do persons. Of course in 
these democratic days we know that " the rank is 
but the guinea-stamp " ; but how many of us act 
upon it ? How many of us would sincerely prefer 
to be befriended by a high-minded greengrocer 
rather than to be tolerated by a commonplace 
Viscount ? There is a good deal of feudal deference 
in our subconscious instincts still — and the melan- 
choly fact remains that we follow very faithfully 
the scriptural precept to make to ourselves friends 
of the mammon of unrighteousness ; and if we fail, 
there are always the everlasting habitations 1 

The point really is that Ruskin, by being 



12 RUSKIN 

brought up in a simple household, where the 
servants were friends rather than hired assistants, 
and having never learnt to keep his distance, did 
undoubtedly learn what rich people often do not 
learn, to meet men and women of every class on 
perfectly equal and natural terms ; and made 
friends accordingly with all, as far as it was in his 
power to make friends. For what strikes one as 
much as anything about Ruskin is that, in spite of 
his charm and grace and eager courtesy, he was 
an essentially lonely man ; partly because of his 
dreams — a dreamer can never be very intimate 
with others — and partly too because he gave his 
heart away to beauty ; and we have none of us 
more than a certain amount of love to give away. 
Thus the artist who must put not his mind only 
but his heart into his work must always have 
something incommunicable about him, beyond 
the reach of human fellowship. 

In most respects, at first sight, there was nothing 
characteristically Scotch about Ruskin ; the typical 
Scot is apt to be a little grim, a little unapproach- 
able ; genial he can be after a solid fashion ; 
but he has little of the emotional abandon of 
the Celt, and little of the sentimentality of the 
Englishman. A character in the Frogs of Aris- 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 13 

tophanes, when he thinks he is being unreason- 
ably dictated to, says : " Don't come trespassing 
on my mind — you have a house of your 
own." And the typical Scot has the same de- 
tachment. He will never, for instance, allow 
emotion to invade business. He is canny, in 
fact. But Ruskin was not superficially canny. 
He met people, young and old alike, with a 
delightful welcome and open arms. He had 
an almost caressing address, and a cordial sweet- 
ness of manner. He was quixotically generous 
about money ; there can have been few men 
who have ever given away in their lifetime so 
large a fortune. -' But there was a good deal of 
dogmatism and sternness behind, as his letters 
abundantly show ; he had no slobbering charity 
for the world, or for the mistakes and failures 
of humanity.^ He was a merciless judge of frailty, 
and had the saeva indignatio of the satirist. He 
was, too, in his way a wary man of business ; 
he made in later years as large an income by 
his books as he would have derived from his 
departed capital. He trod the narrow path 
between sentiment and silliness, saving himself 
from the former by causticity and from the latter 
by dryness. He did many things that seemed 



14 RUSKIN 

alien to common sense, but when he let himself 
go it was rather in the direction of condemnation 
than in the direction of forgiveness. He was 
more on the side of punishment and obedience 
than on the side of rewards and freedom. And 
then, too, he had the spirit of loyalty and fidelity 
to lost causes and forlorn hopes, the spirit that 
has come out again and again in Scotch history. 
And thus the result of our investigation is that 
though a man of genius is a unique thing, and 
must be judged on his own merits, yet there are 
a good many traceable elements in the character 
and temperament of Ruskin which he owed to 
his race and to his nationality. 

3 
I shall not here attempt to tell the story of 
Ruskin's early life in any detail. My chief reason 
is that it has been told with such inimitable grace 
and felicity in his Prctterita that it is impossible 
to retell it. But a few points must be noted. 
When he was four years old, his portrait was 
painted by Northcote, the R.A., of whom he in- 
quired, after sitting for a few minutes, why there 
were holes in the carpet ; and when the little 
boy was asked by the old painter what he would 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 15 

have as the background, he said " Blue hills," 
which is a significant reply. He was fond, too, 
of preaching sermons from a convenient chair- 
back. " People, be good," ran the first sentence 
of the first recorded address. It was what he 
was saying for the rest of his life, though he 
varied the expression a little ! 

A few words must be said as to his education ; 
it was absolutely unconventional, and though 
human temperament has a way of surviving a 
good many rough experiments in communicating 
bias, it is impossible not to see that his nurture 
affected him. In one respect his upbringing 
was ascetic. ^He had very few toys, he had 
to learn to amuse himself on the simplest lines ; 
he was soundly whipped whenever he was naughty 
or wilful, and he was sheltered to an extraordinary 
extent from all external influences./ He says 
that he never saw his parents lose their temper 
or heard their voices raised in anger, or saw 
even a glance of irritation pass between them, 
but that he suffered from having nothing to 
love. ,/He states that he no more loved his 
parents than he would the sun and moon. They 
were just a part of the order of the universe. 
But people cannot be taught love, any more 



i6 RUSKIN 

than they can be prevented from loving ; and 
it is clear that his preternatural activity of ob- 
servation and intelligence were what really drained 
his emotions. He read the Bible with his mother, 
chapter by chapter ; whether they were gene- 
alogical or improper, it mattered nothing. He 
was taught to draw, and he was dangerously 
encouraged to write. The day was seldom long 
enough for all he had to do. He wrote poetry 
and diaries and compilations. Indeed, through 
the whole of his early life his bent and his 
ambitions were poetical, though he hardly ever 
wrote a line of verse which is worth preserving on 
its intrinsic merits. He had no poetical invention 
whatever, and very little sense of rhythm. ''He 
had constant illnesses, and was never sent to 
school ; and he thus lived a very comfortable 
and self-centred life with the two elderly parents, 
saved from discontent by intense activity of mind 
and great sweetness of disposition. His father's 
health was not good ; he travelled constantly, 
both for business and pleasure, collecting orders 
for sherry, and visiting scenes and places of 
interest. Ruskin gained in this atmosphere one 
remarkable characteristic, the power of applying 
himself to his work with complete absorption. 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 17 

wherever he might happen to be. His father 
intended him for the Church, and hoped to see 
him a Bishop ; but he was to preach to a larger 
audience than a diocese could afford, and on 
wider lines than those of orthodox Anglicanism. 
But besides all this dilettante literature and sketch- 
ing, he worked seriously enough at problems 
of geology and mineralogy. And he lived too 
in an atmosphere of culture ; the family had 
moved out of London to Heme Hill, then a 
pleasant leafy suburb on the edge of the open 
country. His father bought pictures, and en- 
tertained artists and interesting people in a quiet 
way. It was a thoroughly precocious childhood, 
but one dares not say what should have been 
altered. Probably he lived too much with his 
elders, and thus acquired a certain touch of old- 
maidishness which never left him. There was 
lacking an element, not of virility, but of mas- 
.culinity ; and then too his mental activity was 
perilously stimulated. Perhaps the irritability 
of brain which worked havoc in his later life 
was partly caused by his prodigious precocity ; 
but on the other hand the atmosphere of school 
life might have given him conventional standards 
and taken the edge off his originality ; and 



i8 RUSKIN 

one is thankful for the net result, whatever its 
drawbacks may have been. 

As he wrote in Prceterita : — 

" I was different, be it once more said, from 
other children even of my own type, not so 
much in the actual nature of the feeling, but 
in the mixture of it. I had, in my little clay 
pitcher, vialfuls, as it were, of Wordsworth's re- 
verence, Shelley's sensitiveness, Turner's accuracy, 
all in one. A snowdrop was to me, as to Words- 
worth, part of the Sermon on the Mount ; but 
I never should have written sonnets to the 
celandine, because it is of a coarse yellow, and 
imperfect form." 

He fell deeply in love at the age of seventeen 
with the daughter of his father's partner, Mr. 
Domecq. Adele Domecq was a French girl, 
brought up in the best Parisian society, and a 
Roman Catholic. She and her sister came to stay 
at Heme Hill, and Ruskin fell a victim to a 
Byronic passion, accompanied by intense self- 
consciousness. The lively girls thought the clever 
boy rather a queer creature, and could not make 
him out ; but it was a serious and devastating 
business, lasting for three years, and the result 
was a serious breakdown in health with symptoms 
of consumption. 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 19 

Meanwhile he had been entered at Christ 
Church ; and here again his parents behaved with 
characteristic prudence. He was made a Gentleman- 
commoner, which threw him into the society of 
the richest and most fashionable undergraduates ; 
and his mother came up to Oxford to look after 
him. The danger was that he would become a 
gigantic joke ; but his amazing simplicity and 
charm triumphed over all obstacles. He was 
half tolerated and half petted ; but he made firm 
friends both among younger and older men ; he 
won the Newdigate Prize Poem, and he plunged 
into print in the region of artistic controversy. 
He described his view of the Oxford life very 
characteristically in Prceterita : — 

" I am amused, as I look back, in now per- 
ceiving what an aesthetic view I had of all my 
tutors and companions — how consistently they 
took to me the aspect of pictures, and how I from 
the lirst declined giving any attention to those 
which were not well painted enough. My ideal 
of a tutor was founded on what Holbein or Diirer 
had represented in Erasmus or Melanchthon, or, 
even more solemnly, on Titian's Magnificoes or 
Bonifazio's Bishops. No presences of that kind 
appeared either in Tom or Peckwater ; and even 
Doctor Pusey (who also never spoke to me) was 
not in the least a picturesque or tremendous 



20 RUSKIN 

figure, but only a sickly and rather ill put together 
English clerical gentleman, who never looked one 
in the face, or appeared aware of the state of the 
weather." 

It was at this time that his father began to buy 
Turner's pictures, and Ruskin made the acquaint- 
ance of the great artist whose fame he was 
afterwards to establish on so secure a basis. He 
wrote : — 

" I found in him a somewhat eccentric, keen- 
mannered, matter-of-fact, English-minded gentle- 
man ; good-natured evidently, bad-tempered 
evidently, hating humbug of all sorts, shrewd, 
perhaps a little selfish, highly intellectual, the 
powers of the mind not brought out with any 
delight in their manifestations, or intention of 
display, but flashing out occasionally in a word 
or a look." 

The account of his early years forms an 
extraordinary record of vigour and enthusiasm ; 
but all this was suspended by his breakdown in 
health, caused undoubtedly by his love affair, and 
thus there fell on him in the middle of all his 
prosperity the first initiation into suffering of 
body and mind, the first taste of the cup of which 
he was afterwards to drink so deep. But he 
recovered, and finished his time at Oxford ; and 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 21 

it was then he learnt, as if by accident, his first 
lesson in that principle of art which he was 
afterwards to extol so matchlessly. It came in 
a drawing-lesson, where he made a study of an 
ivy tendril. Up to that time he had instinctively 
submitted to the artistic fallacy of the day, which 
treated artistic material as a thing to be manipu- 
lated and composed on conventional lines. It 
struck him that nature was not to be improved 
upon, and that absolute sincerity and fidelity were 
the first articles of the artistic creed. With what 
matchless rhetoric he persuaded himself and 
others to believe that Turner, who idealises 
landscape beyond all power of recognition and 
identification, was the supreme exponent of this 
principle, we shall see later. But this little 
incident was the first step on the ladder that he 
was about to climb, and must be allowed its 
due significance. And it was then that he aban- 
doned all his dilettante pursuits. He made no 
more of his old composed drawings ; he flung his 
pencil aside. " A few careful studies of grass- 
blades and Alpine-rose bells ended my Proutism, 
and my trust in drawing things out of my head 
for ever." He took up the task of vindicating 
the heroism of art ; and he determined to show 



22 RUSKIN 

the world that the foundations of art were 
sincerity and truth. 

/ 

' Thus then at the age of twenty-three, this 
young man, with his mind as clear as light, and 
as full of eager vigour as a mountain stream, sat 
down in a lighthearted fashion to write one of 
the great books of the century — great not so 
much for its artistic permanence of form as for 
its driving and inspiring force. He wrote it in 
joy and delight, conscious of strength and purity, 
and this is written large over the page. He gave 
up all idea of being a bishop, and he refused 
disdainfully to enter the sherry business. And 
what was it that he intended to do ? He meant, 
first of all, in Modern Painters, to take a little 
thesis ; to prove at the outset that Turner was 
right in what he saw and what he drew of 
nature, and that most other painters had been 
wrong..' How little he knew of other painters 
he was to show before long ; but at present 
his equipment was this ; he knew the works of 
a few English artists well, such as Gainsborough, 
Cox, de Wint, Copley Fielding, Prout, and Con- 
stable. He had seen too a good many English 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 23 

galleries, and he knew what of older landscape 
artists the patrons of art conspired to admire 
— Salvator Rosa, Caspar Poussin, Claude, and 
Hobbema. And he meant to dispose once and 
for all, as he says in a fine invective, of "the 
various Van somethings and Back somethings, 
more especially and malignantly those who have 
libelled the sea." All this he intended to over- 
throw and set right ; and he meant too to lay 
down a new and a comprehensive philosophy 
of art. 

He wrote the book at Heme Hill in the early 
mornings and for half the day ; and he read it 
aloud, in simple childlike fashion, to papa and 
mamma, and received with outward deference 
their admiring criticisms. 

/The first principle that he states and main- 
tains is that of Truth and Fidelity. He says 
that all the evil of the older landscape art has 
arisen from the painter endeavouring to modify 
the works of Cod, " casting the shadow of him- 
self on all that he sees."/ But if this fidelity were 
all, art would become a mere imitation, and the 
photographer would be the best artist. Ruskin 

begins by showing that you do not see all that 
you think you see. If you see a brick wall at 



24 RUSKIN 

a distance, you know it is a brick wall, and there- 
fore in a spirit of fidelity you set to work to paint 
the bricks ; but you do not actually see them. 
What you have really to paint is the effect which 
a brick wall has on the eye at a distance, that 
effect that makes you infer that it is made of 
bricks, even though you cannot see them ; and 
he tells the story of a naval officer objecting to 
a picture by Turner of a man-of-war at a dis- 
tance, that there were no port-holes — the fact 
being that at a distance you cannot see the 
port-holes. 

But the other side of the thesis is that the 
true artist must select and combine, but never 
sacrifice reality. If you set yourself to paint all 
that you see, you might spend a long lifetime 
on a single picture, and leave it unfinished at 
the end. / " There is . . . more ideality," he 
wrote, " in a great artist's selection and treat- 
ment of roadside weeds and brook-worn pebbles, 
than in all the struggling caricatures of the meaner 
mind, which heaps its foreground with colossal 
columns and heaves impossible mountains into 
the encumbered sky.'j." 

But here we are met by a difficulty at the 
outset ; it begs the question to say that an artist 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 25 

must not cast his own shadow on his works, if 
the next moment it is maintained that the strength 
of the artist Hes in his power of selection and com- 
bination. The real truth is that no one exactly 
knows what lies behind the pleasure of art ; or 
rather that it is so complicated a pleasure, and 
lies so much in the taste and power of the re- 
cipient, that it is impossible to lay down exact 
rules. What really matters is the quality of the 
mind that selects and interprets, and the charm 
which invests his skill. Art may be intensely life- 
like without being like life. What makes the 
difference is the personality of the artist, the way 
in which he interprets nature, and the emotions 
he can arouse by his presentation of it. 

What somewhat vitiates the principles enun- 
ciated by Ruskin is that he admired Turner so 
intensely that he could not see his faults — indeed 
he loved them. Ruskin takes occasion, for in- 
stance, to praise the foregrounds of Turner, the 
figures and the detail. He scoffs at Claude for 
making the people in the foregrounds of his pic- 
tures principally occupied in carrying red trunks 
with locks about. But as a matter of fact the 
figures in Turner's foregrounds are often grotesque 
and ridiculous, and the detail childishly inaccurate 



26 RUSKIN 

and absurd. The glory of Turner is in his vast 
sweep of mellow distances, indicating, by some 
subtle magic, forest and leafy hill and sunlit glade 
and winding river ; in the incredible spaciousness 
of his air, the secret gold of his cloud-veiled suns, 
the prodigal splendour of dawning or waning Hght. 
And Turner by his amazing assiduity and untiring 
observation, by years of hourly labour and by 
unerring fidelity of memory, saw and presented a 
whole host of things that no artist seems ever 
to have dared to see, much less to paint before. 
The perversity of Ruskin lay not in his praising 
Turner, but in his discrediting the work of those 
other great artists each of whom, except perhaps 
Salvator Rosa, who is a merely melodramatic 
scene-painter, has his own charm. 

Turner left two great pictures by his will to the 
National Gallery, with the condition that they 
should be hung side by side with two great 
Claudes, with the intention that his own work 
should gain by juxtaposition with what was so 
false and unreal. For a time, no doubt, the 
patient sheeplike gazer obediently saw all the glory 
of Turner and all the vileness of Claude which 
Ruskin bade him see. But now any one who will 
look calmly at the two, will see that the Claudes 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 27 

have an incomparable charm of their own. The 
golden sunlight of a great summer day falls with a 
mellow richness on vale and promontory, where 
the waves lap gently in the haze-hung bays. 
There is a sense of meditative content about the 
whole, the happy weariness that thinks gratefully 
of the end of labour and the coming in of the 
night. The scene is full of incommunicable 
romance ; the ruined grass-grown temples, the 
embattled villas, the dim figures of men and 
women all have a life of their own, if one could 
but penetrate its secret. To deny the charm of 
Claude is to deny the sense of romance, the power 
of imagination which can build a wistful dream 
of what life could have been like, by disregarding 
for the moment the harsher elements, and leaving 
only the pure and beauty-haunted visions in which 
hope and memory are so rich, but which our 
human world, with its strange admixture of pain 
and darkness, make it so hard to realise and retain. 
The real fact was, and it may at once be stated, 
that Ruskin was not largely endowed with imagi- 
nation. He had so clear a vision for the precise 
and definite forms of beauty which he could see, 
the world was to him so rich and various, that he 
did not or could not enter into the promise of 



28 RUSKIN 

poetry. If this is not clearly understood, one is 
under an entire misconception, both of his powers 
and his limitations. His strength lay in his 
intense perception of what was there ; but he was 
a moralist and not a poet ; he had little sense of 
symbols, he had little touch of music in his com- 
position. He saw the light on things so clearly, 
that he did not see the hidden light that falls 
through things. " I was only interested," he 
wrote, " by things near me, or at least clearly 
visible and present." He paid a heavy penalty for 
this in his days of later darkness ; but in those 
early days, the rapture of light and colour and 
form so filled his heart and mind, that he did 
not see those further secrets which can only be 
guessed at and perceived, hardly shared or uttered, 
but the truth of which, if a man has once 
tasted them, has a sacredness that is beyond all 
words. 

What further did he set himself to do ? No less, 
as I have said, than to make a reasoned philosophy 
of all art. And he did this, not in a loose or 
vague way, but arguing like Aristotle and Euclid, 
as cogently and strictly as he knew how. Now it 
seems to me that though here he attempted an 
impossibility, it was all on the right lines ; it is 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 29 

only by the application of the scientific method to 
psychological things that we can penetrate human 
psychology ; and though one may not be wholly 
convinced by Ruskin's reasoning, it is good to 
send one's mind to school with him. He sets out 
with a large scheme, as Plato, in the Republic, set 
out to analyse the nature of Justice. We end, 
perhaps, when we have read the Republic, by 
knowing little more about Justice than when we 
began. We feel like St. Augustine, who replied 
to the pert question, '' What is Time ? " — " I know 
when you do not ask me." But we have caught 
glimpses of many beautiful things as we proceed. 
The force of Ruskin's work lies not in the argu- 
ment, which is inconclusive enough, but in the 
shower of stimulating and enlightening things he 
lets fall by the way. These pages of close reason- 
ing are relieved at intervals by passages of won- 
derful and luscious beauty, those great musical 
sentences, so full of colour and movement, so clear 
and sweet of cadence, which dapple the sun- 
scorched path as with a burst of shade and 
bloom. It was this which gave the book its 
appeal ; and Ruskin used to complain that the 
public loved his pretty sentences and cared no- 
thing for his principles. It was true enough ; the 



30 RUSKIN 

sentences were amazingly beautiful, the principles 
were dry and inconclusive. 

Let me quote one instance, in passing, of the sort 
of admirable sidelight he throws upon art. He 
says that the untrained mind is unduly impressed 
by the first sketch, the beginnings of the picture. 
That five chalk touches bring a head to life, and 
that no other five touches in the course of the 
sketch will ever do so much. But he shows 
clearly enough that the trained onlooker is not 
thus misled, and that the true appreciation of art 
lies in the recognition of the intellectual and 
technical power that completes and develops the 
picture. 

The first volume of Modern Painters was pub- 
lished by the father's advice anonymously — " by 
a graduate of Oxford." It won an instant re- 
cognition. Tennyson, Sydney Smith, Sir Henry 
Taylor agreed that here was a new spirit and a 
new voice. The world found out the secret, and 
laid hands on the author ; and Ruskin began to 
learn the truth of the famous saying which he 
afterwards uttered, that the artist must fit himself 
in all ways for the best society, and then must 
abjure it. 

And then there came a sudden revulsion. He 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 31 

went to the Louvre in 1844, and there suddenly 
burst upon him the knowledge, which he had 
never previously suspected, of the greatness of 
the Venetian school of Italian painters — Titian, 
Veronese, Bellini. He rushed to Italy in the 
following year, and began a fierce study of 
media3val art ; and he did not merely look and 
observe — he drew, day after day, for eight or nine 
hours, copying pictures and frescoes. And then 
all in a moment he saw the Tintorettos at Venice, 
and the current of his future life was altered : it 
was an artistic conversion. He realised, in an 
instant, that the art of the sixteenth century was 
supremely and undeniably great, when, by all his 
ingrained religious theories, it ought to have been 
base and vile. He had been brought up in the 
straitest evangelicalism, and sincerely believed that 
any art based upon or springing from Catholic 
influences must be inherently degraded. It was 
not the realisation of Italian art generally, but 
of the art of the Renaissance in particular, which 
knocked his early theories to pieces. We must 
not too hastily blame him for rashness and care- 
lessness. Nowadays, with all the photographs 
and reproductions of great pictures which are 
accessible to all, it is possible for the most 



32 RUSKIN 

sedentary person to form some idea of the varied 
treasures of Italian art. But all this was non- 
existent then ; indeed it is Ruskin's influence that 
is mainly responsible for the change. 

At Venice he took a fever, and a time of 
horrible depression followed. And now for the 
first time in his life he says he had the ex- 
perience of intense and agonised prayer to God, 
a prayer which was instantly answered. But 
this sense of a direct relation with God did not 
last, and he drifted away into the " darkness of 
the Underworld." 

It must be remembered, as I have said, that 
he had been brought up in the severest evangeli- 
calism. He had been continually finding out the 
limitations and inconsistencies, and even errors, 
of the old grim creed ; and now he wrote patheti- 
cally : " It seemed to me quite sure since my 
downfall of heart . . . that I had no part nor lot 
in the privileges of the saints ; but, on the con- 
trary, had such share only in the things of God as 
well-conducted beasts and serenely minded birds 
had." 

And then he plunged into the second volume 
of Modern Painters, which he said was written 
*' at the moulting-time " of his life, and drew out 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 33 

the theory of beauty. But it was characteristic 
of Ruskin that though the revelation of Italian 
art had knocked his former theory to bits, he 
never thought of abjuring it, or of reconstructing 
a new theory. He only attempted to fit in to 
the old scheme the new principles, with what 
confusion of thought may be seen in that second 
volume. The book is not easy reading ; it is 
closely and rigidly argued, with some mistakes 
in fact, but with a marvellous copiousness of 
illustration. He was trying, on the Aristote- 
lian method, in the manner of Locke, and in 
the style of Hooker, to argue principles out of 
facts. His aim was to present a theory of Beauty 
— perhaps the most difficult thing in the world, 
because it is so impossible to see into other 
people's minds in such a matter, or to know 
what they admire and why they admire it. The 
perception of beauty is all such a subjective thing, 
and so bound up with traditions and associations, 
that it is next to impossible to generalise at all 
about it, because half one's facts must be drawn 
from one's own experience ; and who can say 
what inheritance of use and circumstance may 
not dictate the limits of our own taste and dis- 
taste ? Take for a simple instance the ideals of 



34 RUSKIN 

Japanese art. In the case of details like flowers 
or leaves, insects or birds, it is obvious that a 
Japanese artist is trying to draw what he sees, 
and to catch what he thinks beautiful in them. 
But Japanese artists have inherited a tradition of 
representation which makes one wonder if indeed 
they see at all what we see. The flatness of the 
whole design, the lack of depth and perspective 
and shadow, compel us to recognise that they 
are on the look-out for a set of qualities that we 
do not see, and unconsciously neglecting a whole 
set of qualities, on which to our own mind the 
whole lifelikeness of a picture depends. The 
only evidence which we can quote in our own 
favour, is that a photograph seems nearer to an 
English picture than it is to a Japanese. The 
great bare streaks and patches of a Japanese 
picture, which make the whole look like a mosaic 
of suspended vignettes — the treatment of water, 
with indigo streaks and spongy crumpled foam, 
with no indication of motion or depth or con- 
tinuity; these things make us see that there are 
different conventions in the art of different 
nations, and that we expect in a picture, not 
what we see in nature, but what we have learnt to 
expect on a canvas. But Ruskin was not daunted 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 35 

by such considerations ; he had observed so 
much, drawn it so faithfully and loved it so in- 
tensely, that he was quite ready to evolve a theory 
of beauty out of his own consciousness. And thus 
the book is not really a philosophical treatise, but 
a close analysis of his own sensations, the whole 
written with a vehemence and an intellectual 
passion that make it at all events an extremely 
suggestive document.XThe theory is all dominated 
by Ruskin's hitherto unshaken religious sense. 
He accounts for our sense of beauty by referring 
it to the attributes of God. Ruskin knew far 
more about God in those days than he dared to 
know later ; and the treatise really puts art on 
a moral basis, by referring it to the " heavenward 
duty " of mankind. But Ruskin hated meta- 
physics — he had been saved by Dr. Johnson, he 
once said, from being caught in the cobwebs of 
German metaphysics, or sloughed in the English 
drainage of Theism. And thus he swept specu- 
lation aside, and laid down the principle that 
beauty is the bread of the soul, and that we must 
advance, as we live on, from what is brilliant to 
what is pure./ And so he was led to the 
conclusion that a false-hearted and impious man 
could not be a great imaginative painter. This 



36 RUSKIN 

judgment must be here quoted, because of all 
Ruskin's deliberate judgments it is perhaps one 
that has done him most harm as an ccsthetic 
philosopher, since it is a judgment that is directly 
opposed to facts ; and it is opposed to facts, 
because it takes no account whatever of the 
strange admixture of good and evil in so many 
lives, and most of all in the lives of artists. A 
man may see what is glorious and pure, and 
represent it, if he has skill of hand and eye ; but 
he may also see what is beautiful without being 
pure, and be sorrowfully enslaved by it : and 
perhaps some of the finest of all art is borne out 
of that very struggle. What would Ruskin have 
made, if he had known it, of the strange grossness 
and coarseness of fibre that lay beneath the life 
of his beloved Turner ? When he did learn it, 
later on, he found himself unable to write the 
life of the artist, as he had planned to do. Of 
course neither lofty imagination nor technical 
skill — which demands for its continuous strength 
and clearness the simplicity of the ascetic and the 
training of an athlete — can be expected from a 
man hopelessly abandoned to sensuality. To 
achieve mastery, whether of thought or art, a man 
must be self-restrained and temperate. We have 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 37 

a way of limiting our use of the word sin to sins 
of the body ; but sins of the mind and heart 
we class with political crime as hardly discredit- 
able misdemeanours. And indeed the gloomy 
pride of Michelangelo, the acrid irritability of 
Beethoven, did not mar the spirituality of their 
art. 

5 
/Ten years were to pass before the volumes 
III. and IV. of Modern Painters were to see the 
light ; and they were the years of Ruskin's life 
of which we know the least./ The family had 
moved to a larger house on Denmark Hill, a 
big villa, with seven acres of garden and paddock, 
with glass-houses and stables, fowl-houses and 
piggeries, where the pigs '' spoke excellent Irish " ; 
but all this was the natural enough consequence 
of growing wealth — for old Mr. Ruskin was now 
becoming a very rich man. Yet the change gave 
but little proportionate pleasure to any of the 
three that had come from the simpler delights 
of Heme Hill. Ruskin himself passed through 
a time of much despondency. And one un- 
happy episode cannot be wholly passed over, 
though he never said a word of it himself in 



38 RUSKIN 

his own autobiography. ^He married in 1848, 
half thoughtlessly, half wilfully, the daughter 
of old family friends, a girl, Euphemia Gray, 
for whom some years before he had written 
his charming allegory, The King of the Golden 
River. It was a marriage only in name. There 
was little in common between the pair, Mrs. 
Ruskin's interests being mainly social and 
personal./ 

/They settled in London, and Ruskin wrote the 
Seven Lamps of Architecture, which may be held 
to have had a stronger practical effect on Eng- 
lish architectural art than any other of his 
writings : it shook conventional ideas rudely and 
roughly about. The Seven Lamps, which he 
confessed he had great difficulty in not making 
into eight or nine, are seven great moral qualities 
— Truth, Beauty, Power, Sacrifice, Obedience, 
Labour, and Memory. The one cardinal 
principle was that buildings ought to look what 
they are, and to serve their purpose ; that it is 
an architect's business to decorate construction 
and not to construct decoration/ These and 
other like principles have become so much a 
matter of course, that one is apt to forget how 
novel and how precise they were at the time. 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 39 

and from what unmeaning muddle of false ideas 
they rescued us. /The art which Ruskin selected 
to praise as innately beautiful was the art of 
Italian fourteenth-century Gothic. ; I believe myself 
that it will be seen some day that the book, by 
its force and vehemence, caused an artificial 
interruption or suspension of the development 
of our native architecture. The novels of Walter 
Scott and the Oxford Movement had cut sharply 
across the classical ideals so nobly initiated by 
Wren, but which in the distracted apathy of the 
eighteenth century — its greedy materialism, its 
ugly indifference to the arts of peace — had be- 
come every year more tame and dull. But it 
was an interruption for all that, and the mid- 
Victorian Gothic is a very shallow ripple on the 
tide of art. We seem to be feeling our way 
at present, through great restlessness and wilful- 
ness, to a style of which classical art is the 
ground-work. This might have been done 
earlier, but for Ruskin and Pugin ; but English 
architecture was indeed a valley of dry bones, 
which needed a shaking and a sorting before 
they could stand upon their feet. 

I will here quote a description of the life lived 
at Denmark Hill, written by a strange pietistic 



40 RUSKIN 

artist called James Smetham, who never fulfilled 
the promise of his youth. 

" ' I walked there,' writes Smetham, ' through 
the wintry weather, and got in about dusk. One 
or two gossiping details will interest you before I 
give you what I care for ; and so I will tell you 
that he has a large house with a lodge, and a 
valet and footman and coachman, and grand 
rooms glittering with pictures, chiefly Turner's, 
and that his father and mother live with him, or 
he with them. His father is a fine old gentleman, 
who has a lot of bushy grey hair, and eyebrows 
sticking up all rough and knowing, with a com- 
fortable way of coming up to you with his hands 
in his pockets, and making you comfortable, and 
saying, in answer to your remark, that "John's" 
prose works are pretty good. His mother is a 
ruddy, dignified, richly-dressed old gentlewoman 
of seventy-five, who knows Chamonix better than 
Camberwell ; evidently a good old lady, with the 
Christian Treasury tossing about on the table. 
She puts " John " down, and holds her own 
opinions, and flatly contradicts him ; and he re- 
ceives all her opinions with a soft reverence and 
gentleness that is pleasant to witness. 

" ' I wish I could reproduce a good impression of 
" John " for you, to give you the notion of his 
" perfect gentleness and lowlihood." He certainly 
bursts out with a remark, and in a contradictious 
way, but only because he believes it, with no air 
of dogmatism or conceit. He is different at 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 41 

home from that which he is in a lecture before a 
mixed audience, and there is a spiritual sweetness 
in the half-timid expression of his eyes ; and in 
bowing to you, as in taking wine, with (if I heard 
aright) " I drink to thee," he had a look that has 
followed me, a look bordering on tearful. 

" * He spent some time in this way. Unhanging 
a Turner from the wall of a distant room, he 
brought it to the table and put it in my hands ; 
then we talked ; then he went up into his study 
to fetch down some illustrative print or drawing : 
in one case, a literal view which he had travelled 
fifty miles to make, in order to compare with the 
picture. And so he kept on gliding all over the 
house, hanging and unhanging, and stopping a 
few minutes to talk.' " 

But in the life of Ruskin a catastrophe was 
close at hand. He himself was bored and tired 
by society, and his young wife was absorbed in it. 
In 1853 the pair went to Scotland, Millais came 
to stay with them and painted their portraits. 
The face of Euphemia Ruskin may be seen to 
this day in the beautiful and tender picture, the 
Order of Release, where the young barefooted 
Scotch Bride, with a tranquil pride, presents the 
document for the freedom of her husband to the 
kindly gaoler. Not long after Mrs. Ruskin left her 
home and returned to her parents. A suit for 
nullity was brought against her husband, and was 



42 RUSKIN 

not defended ; and she shortly afterwards married 
Millais. The first marriage had been a mistake 
from beginning to end, and was best annulled. 
Ruskin returned to his own family circle, and 
devoted himself to his work with ever-increasing 
tenacity and perseverance. 

' It was during his married life that he made his 
studies for The Stones of Venice, six hundred quarto 
pages of notes, as he tells us ; and the book was 
finished in 1852. It was nobly illustrated too, 
with engravings done under his close super- 
intendence from his own drawings./ 
7 The theory of the book was to teach the laws 
of constructive art, and the dependence of all 
human work or edifice on the happy life of the 
workman. •' Here is struck the first note of his 
later theories of social reform./. The strange thing 
is that Ruskin ran his theory violently against 
all facts. /The Parthenon, The Pantheon, St. 
Sophia's, St. Paul's, which will be admitted to be 
four of the finest buildings in the world, all 
sprang from periods conspicuous for moral and 
social corruption, and what is more, from periods 
when the workman was mercilessly sweated and 
mechanically coerced ; they are in fact the pro- 
duct of the rankest and most violent individualism./ 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 43 

But here again, though the root idea was a false 
one, the book is splendidly suggestive and 
urgently inspiring. William Morris summed up 
the teaching of the book so forcibly and enthu- 
siastically, that I will quote his judgment here. 
He wrote : — 

"The lesson which Ruskin here teaches us is 
that art is the expression of man's pleasure in 
labour ; that it is possible for man to rejoice 
in his work, for, strange as it may seem to us 
to-day, there have been times when he did 
rejoice in it ; and lastly, that unless man's work 
once again becomes a pleasure to him, the token 
of which change will be that beauty is once again 
a natural and necessary accompaniment of pro- 
ductive labour, all but the worthless must toil in 
pain, and therefore live in pain ... if this be 
true ... it follows that the hallowing of labour by 
art is the one aim for us at the present day. If 
politics are to be anything else than an empty 
game, more exciting but less innocent than those 
which are confessedly games of skill or chance, 
it is towards this goal of the happiness of labour 
that they must make." 

But the strange thing is that at the very time 
when Ruskin was preaching that justice, mercy, 
and pure religion are the soil in which great art 
flourishes, that " fidelity to the legible laws of an 
undoubted God " was the mainspring of art, his 



44 RUSKIN 

old rigid Calvinistic creed was collapsing. /He 
knew nothing of history, and still less of ecclesi- 
astical history ; nothing at all of sociology. He 
found himself saying that Catholicism was the 
most debasing and degrading of all creeds, while 
he was being forced to uphold the fervour and 
sincerity of the best Catholic art./ But he acted 
characteristically enough. He saw the truth in 
a flash. A humbler man might perhaps have set 
to work to read history and study philosophy ; but 
this Ruskin could not do, and we cannot desire 
that he should have done so. The evils which 
he saw and testified against were there ; the 
truths he upheld were there : but he had not 
the least idea of the marvellous interplay and com- 
plexity of social and vital forces ; there was no 
middle ground for him. /A quality, an age, a 
person was to Ruskin entirely and indisputably 
noble, or hopelessly and irredeemably vile./ /And 
so without reflection, but with indignation and 
vehemence, he started on a crusade against all 
religious and social and philosophical orthodoxies, 
and became a sorrowful prophet enough ; but his 
sorrow had a fruitful appeal which his dogmatism 
had never possessed. 



LECTURE II 



I HAVE now traced the story of the first three 
decades of Riiskin's Hfe, up to the age of thirty 
or thereabouts, while he was still an art-critic. I 
will now attempt to define briefly his relation to 
the art of his time ; and the point I wish to make 
clear, a point which requires to be firmly stated, 
is this :/ Ruskin was never in the technical sense 
an art-critic at all. He wrote about art, it is true, 
and he wrote about it with considerable technical 
knowledge. He was a real artist himself, and he 
thus had a considerable practical knowledge of 
the aims, the difficulties, the obstacles, the theory 
and the treatment of art//But to be a compre- 
hensive critic of art, and it was this which Ruskin 
undertook to be, a man must have a compre- 
hensive view of art — he must be erudite, he must 
have a knowledge at once wide and detailed ; 
and this Ruskin did not possess/ His acquaintance 
with pictorial art was partial and limited. He 



46 RUSKIN 

came to the task with furious preferences and 
almost fanatical prepossessions. /He knew some- 
thing about the two great English schools of art — 
portraiture and landscape. He knew a very little 
of Italian art, but, as I have shown, there were 
whole schools, such as the Venetian and the 
Florentine schools which, when he began his 
work, were as sealed books to him. He was 
intolerant of Dutch art, and of French and Spanish 
schools he knew nothing whatever./ He did not 
exactly claim omniscience, but he claimed an 
absolute certainty and a rightness of judgment 
which nothing but omniscience could have justi- 
fied him in claiming. 

But as I say, he was not really criticising and 
comparing and analysing art at all. The pictures 
he knew were but as glowing brands which kindled 
his emotion and his mind. /His real concern was 
the philosophy of art, or rather the ethics of artw/ 
/Moral ideas were what he was in search of all 
along. / It may be said roughly that all idealists 
are really in search of one and the same thing, 
though they call it by different names. They are 
all in search of a certain transforming and uplift- 
ing power, something which may stand up " above 
the howling senses' ebb and flow," some force 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 47 

which may bring mankind tranquillity and inner 
happiness — not a listless and indolent happiness, 
but the happiness which comes of having an aim 
and a goal, a cause to fight for, a secret to inter- 
pret, a message to announce, a dream which is 
to be brighter and purer than material dreams, a 
vision which is to outlast life and to help on the 
regeneration of the world. 

He wrote long after of his own qualifications 
as a critic of art :— 

" If I have powers fitted for this task (and I 
should not have attempted it but in conviction 
that I have), they are owing mainly to this one 
condition of my life, that, from my youth up, I 
have been seeking the fame and honouring the 
work of others — never my own. /l first was 
driven into literature that I might defend the fame 
of Turner j/ since that day I have been explaining 
the power, or proclaiming the praise, of Tintoret 
— of Luini — of Carpaccio — of Botticelli — of 
Carlyle ; never thinking for an instant of myself ; 
and sacrificing what little faculty and large pleasure 
I had in painting either from nature or noble art, 
that, if possible, I might bring others to see what I 
rejoiced in, and understand what I had deciphered. 
There has been no heroism in this, nor virtue — 
but only, as far as I am myself concerned, quaint 
ordering of Fate ; but the result is, that I have at 
last obtained an instinct of impartial and reverent 



48 RUSKIN 

judgment, which sternly fits me for this final work, 
to which, if to anything, I was appointed." 

/Ruskin then believed the secret of life as well 
as of art to lie in a sort of heavenly obedience, 
a triumphant energy, a fiery contemplation./ The 
reason why he clothed his message at first in terms 
of art is a mere question of faculty./ To Ruskin 
the purest delight of which his spirit was capable 
came through the eye, through the mysteries of 
light and colour, of form and curve — the devices 
which make such a man say in a rapture of 
spiritual satisfaction, " Yes, it is like that ! " He 
had both the eye for effect and the eye for detail, 
sight at once extended and microscopical. He 
wrote of himself, " I had a sensual faculty of plea- 
sure in sight, as far as I know unparalleled." 
/ But if he had been a musician he would have at- 
tacked the problem in precisely the same way, only 
with a different terminology. We may be sure that 
in music he would have had some three or four 
supreme favourites ; he would have swept the rest 
aside with one impartial gesture. He would have 
asserted with impassioned rhetoric that the inspir- 
ing musician was also the virtuous man. If the 
facts had been against him, he would have main- 
tained that the great musician, though disfigured 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 49 

by glaring faults, had still some inner righteous- 
ness of soul, while he would have blackened the 
record of musicians whose music he believed to 
be on the wrong lines ! / 

It was noble and enthusiastic theorising, most 
of it, and no deficiency of knowledge can detract 
from the inspiration of it. It could and it did 
kindle the seed of flame in many a generous 
mind ; but it was not art criticism. /No one can 
be a critic who is deeply and obviously biassed, 
who is from first to last a partisan. / He may, 
it is true, reveal the special merit of the artists 
whom he admires, but he cannot arrive patiently 
at the principles of art, because he cannot really ^ 
compare artists ; he can only eulogise or vilify/ 
Ruskin was never just. But that mattered little, 
because justice is required of the philosopher or 
the statesman, not of the poet and the prophet. 
And thus it is impossible to make a greater 
mistake than to consider Ruskin to have been a 
critic of art |/ he was a prophet of art, a rheto- 
rician, a moralist, but he was not a judge nor 
an arbiter, and still less a historian of art.// 

In those first fifteen years, while his joy was 
mainly in art, and while he wished to share his 
joy with others, he preached from that one text. 

D 



/ 



50 RUSKIN 

His disillusionment came not with art but with 
humanity. When he found that the ordinary 
man did not care for art, and could neither be 
inspired nor scolded into regarding it seriously, he 
plunged into the study of the causes which made 
men so indifferent, so brutal, so materialistic : that 
was the period of his political economy and of his 
social studies./ 

And then when he was headed off again, and 
found again that he could not reform or regene- 
rate the world in the twinkling of an eye, that 
men would not — he never perceived that they 
could not — see what was to himself so evident, 
so glorious, so divine, then he surrendered himself 
to a sort of despair ; and even that was beautiful, 
because he never lost his gracious tenderness, his 
delicate irony of utterance. 

We must then keep this in mind — that art 
criticism was to Ruskin not more than the habit 
and vesture of the priest, but that all the time 
his hand was raised to consecrate and to bless, 
and his heart was set upon the divine mystery, 
of which the bread on the gleaming dish and the 
wine in the jewelled chalice were but the fair and 
seemly symbols. 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 51 

2 

There is a theory of art which is sedulously put 
forward nowadays and passionately defended — 
that art alone, of all the provinces of human 
activity, must exist for its own sake. The theory 
is that it is the expression that matters, that it 
need not even be beauty of which the artist is 
in search : that he must observe, must keep his 
eye on the object, and make a sincere and perfect 
presentment of it, whatever the object may be — 
a mental conception, an intellectual idea, a land- 
scape, a face, and so on down to things mean 
and pitiful and grotesque. 

The theory is to me so meaningless from the 
outset that I cannot perhaps do justice to it. It 
may be true of exact sciences like mathematics, 
philosophy, history, where the thing aimed at 
is the disentangling of some definite truth, some 
equation of values — which is an altogether intel- 
lectual process. But when the process is an 
emotional one, the theory appears to me to have 
no meaning. You cannot so restrict and confine 
vital processes. Of course art is vitiated, as every- 
thing else is vitiated, if you are not really pursuing 
it at all, but something else. If you write a novel. 



52 RUSKIN 

the purport of which is not to present a story, 
but to further the cause of Foreign Missions, the 
art of your writing will be hurt exactly in so far 
as you allow your ultimate aim to modify the 
truth and vitality of your picture. Art is partly 
a question of method and form, partly of subject 
and impulse. Anything which awes or interests 
or charms or amuses the human mind is fit to 
be treated of by art : religion, morals, sociology, 
science — all alike can be treated artistically. I 
will go further, and say that most of the best 
literary art of the nineteenth century in England 
consists in the treatment of moral ideas — Words- 
worth, Browning, Tennyson, Carlyle, Ruskin, all 
were moralists. In fact Ruskin by himself seems 
to me, once and for all, to dispose of the theory 
of art for art's sake. He began by treating mainly 
of art, and while he did so, his handling of it 
was artistic enough ; but when moral ideas took 
possession of and dominated his mind, so far 
from his art being vitiated by the inrush of this 
stronger tide, it grew in delicacy and perfection 
every year ; and what is yet more surprising, 
when he took to writing Fors Clavigera, and threw 
overboard all consideration of form, the thing 
became more beautiful still ; so that he reached 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 53 

the perfection of his art by preoccupation with 
moral ideas, and deUberate neglect of form. That 
is the worst, and in another way the best, of these 
dominant geniuses, that they knock to bits all 
pedantic theories of art, and force dogmatists to 
reconstruct their principles. And thus they tend 
to show that art is really a question of inspiration 
and instinct, and not a question of rules and 
precedents. The vital thing is to have something 
to say, and the next thing is to be able to say 
it cogently, persuasively, clearly and beautifully : 
and in Ruskin's case, as in the case of others, 
the art of expression gained, the less he studied 
it. Of course his practice told, but what really 
gave his words force and charm was the intense 
desire to convince and to persuade that lay behind 
it all. 

The opposite result is well illustrated by the case 
of Tennyson. When in early days Tennyson said 
what was in his mind, as sincerely and as beautifully 
as possible, his art was at its strongest, but when 
he began to try to express what he did not really 
care about, but what he thought would be approved 
of by the public — what was expected of him, 
what he ought to care about — he became popular 
and inartistic. Now Ruskin became popular 



54 RUSKIN 

in spite of himself. He thought that the aims, 
the hopes, the pleasures, the ideals of the world 
in which he lived, were not only low but becoming 
lower. He protested, he vituperated, he broke 
out into irony and expostulation ; where he went 
wrong was when he dogmatised about the limits 
of what was beautiful and desirable ; when he 
scolded people for caring about the art for which 
he himself did not happen to care, or held up 
as models of unimpeachable beauty the sHght 
and trivial books and pictures in which he de- 
tected a congenial motive. But his influence was 
due partly to the fact that he did care vehemently 
and passionately for certain forms of expression 
and certain ideals of life, and partly too to the 
fact that he could invest what he said with the 
indescribable quality called charm, which has 
as yet escaped the severest critical analysis. " 

But the mistake which men make who uphold 
art for art's sake, is the mistake which is made 
by those who think that good manners can be 
cultivated apart from the unselfishness and the 
sympathy of which they are the natural expression, 
or by the ecclesiastical persons who believe that 
religion is wholly bound up with ceremonies. 
Art is nothing but the love of beauty finding 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 55 

utterance. Like water, it will flow in natural 
channels ; its rules are not arbitrary regulations, 
but the self-created forms of its own secret laws ; 
and to confine it under the sway of precedents, 
is as though a botanist were to condemn an 
unknown flower because it violated the principles 
deduced from the flowers he knows. The only 
fruitful kind of criticism is that which recognises 
and welcomes a new force in art, a new form 
of expression, not the criticism which lays down 
a precise and inelastic code. In all provinces 
of life which deal with vital and progressive 
emotions, the only people who are certainly 
wrong are the orthodox, because the orthodox 
are those who think that development has 
ceased, and that the results can be tabulated. 
And thus they resent any further development, 
because it interferes with their conclusions, and 
gives them a sense of insecurity and untidiness, 
and the upsetting of agreeable arrangements. 
/in his artistic criticism Ruskin began by being 
unorthodox, and in breaking, like Mahomet, the 
idols of the land./ But he ended by creating 
his own orthodoxy, and arriving at a sort of Papal 
infallibility, which was perfectly rigid and entirely 
impenetrable. Yet he never made the mistake 



56 RUSKIN 

of regarding art as an end in itself. As his 
outlook widened, he began to regard the due 
acceptance of his own preferences in art as a sign 
and symptom of moral healthiness, and any devia- 
tion from that loyalty seemed to him an offence 
not against taste but against morals. In his views 
upon art and life he was really intensely denomina- 
tional. He was the master of a sheep fold, and all 
outside were thieves and robbers. He required 
absolute obedience, but he had not that note 
of personal dominance which distinguishes the 
founder of a school. The real way to read and 
to follow Ruskin is to share his generous enthu- 
siasms, and frankly to disregard his personal 
dictation. He is a great guide but an unsafe 
ruler. One may thankfully start on pilgrimage 
with him, but one must be prepared to part 
company with him where the roads divide over 
the hill. 

3 

/And now there followed a very full and 
vigorous period of ten years, from 185 i to i860. 
Ruskin began his crusade with a curious little 
volume : Notes on the Construction of Sheep/olds. It 
is said that a good many copies of this pamphlet 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 57 

were bought by Yorkshire and Cumberland 
farmers, under the impression that it was an essay 
in technical agriculture, and that they were vexed 
to find it an appeal for Christian unity./ It was a 
plea to Anglicanism to abandon Catholic preten- 
sions, and to Presbyterianism to adopt Episcopal- 
ianism. Of course most religious men have been 
appalled, at one time or another, to find Christians 
more divided from each other than from the 
heathen by intense conviction and violent indigna- 
tion over points the significance of which would 
be almost unintelligible, by reason of their 
similarity, to a convinced Buddhist. Of course 
compromise seems easy and reasonable enough, 
but reason is a very secondary force compared 
with consistency and tradition. And Ruskin was 
distressed to find how firmly the adders of artistic 
orthodoxy stopped their ears against the voice 
of the wisest of charmers. 

In these years he went much into society and 
made many of his best friendships. He took up 
the cause of the Pre-Raphaelites, Rossetti, Holman 
Hunt, Burne-Jones and Millais, and invested that 
singular revolt with an interest which it has never 
lost. Ruskin's relations with Rossetti are ex- 
tremely interesting, for this reason. Rossetti 



58 RUSKIN 

was certainly one of the strongest personalities 
in the region of art that the last century pro- 
duced. He was an absolute pagan, and an al- 
most inconceivable individualist. He took not 
the slightest interest in history or philosophy or 
movements of any kind. He once divided the 
human race into two classes : artists, and the 
people whose duty it was to admire art and to 
pay for its production. But he had a magnetic 
force and a royal generosity of spirit, that made 
him one of the most dominant personalities of 
the world of art. The acquaintance began with 
sympathy and deference. Ruskin exhorted Ros- 
setti to work, bought his pictures, petted him, 
lectured him, criticised him. But it was an im- 
possible alliance. Rossetti was indifferent to the 
claims of morality, and inflamed by the holy iire 
of art. The inevitable rupture followed. Ruskin 
found himself calmly disregarded, and Rossetti 
went on his own dark way into sorrow and 
silence. Each descended into hell ; but Ruskin's 
inferno led him out into a clearer air, while the 
torture-chamber of Rossetti was the grim cul-de- 
sac from which the soul must somehow or other 
retrace her burdened steps in anguish. But for a 
time they worked in concert, till the gulf opened 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 59 

beneath their feet. Here is one of Raskin's letters 

to Rossetti, which gives so curious an account of 

his own disposition, as it appeared to himself, 

and in so intimate a strain, that it is worth 

considering ; — 

" You constantly hear a great many people 
saying I am very bad, and perhaps you have 
been yourself disposed lately to think me very 
good — I am neither the one nor the other. I 
am very self-indulgent, very proud, very ob- 
stinate, and very resentful ; on the other side, 
I am very upright — nearly as just as I suppose 
it is possible for man to be in this world — ex- 
ceedingly fond of making people happy, and 
devotedly reverent to all true mental or moral 
power. I never betrayed a trust — never wilfully 
did an unkind thing — and never, in little or large 
matters, depreciated another that I might raise 
myself. I believe I once had affections as 
warm as most people ; but partly from evil 
chance, and partly from foolish misplacing of 
them, they have got tumbled down and broken 
to pieces. ... I have no friendships and no 
loves. . . . My pleasures are in seeing, thinking, 
reading, and making people happy (if I can con- 
sistently with my own comfort). And I take these 
pleasures." 

I And at this time too began for Ruskin the 
career as a lecturer, which was perhaps to bring 
him closer to the hearts of men even than his 



6o RUSKIN 

great books, /it is characteristic to note the view 
which the secluded household at Denmark Hill 
took of the occupation. His father sorrowfully 
permitted the venture — the son invariably had 
his own way — but said that it was degrading 
for a man to expose himself to journalistic 
comment and personal references. The mother, 
more lost in privacy, said grimly that he was 
too young, though he was a married man of 
thirty-four. " I cannot reconcile myself," she 
wrote, " to the thought of your bringing your- 
self personally before the world till you are 
somewhat older and stronger." 

In 1853 Ruskin was at work writing notes 
for the Arundel Society on Giotto's frescoes at 
Padua. This little book, since reprinted, has 
a special charm, because Giotto was one of 
Ruskin's particular heroes. He constantly returns 
to Giotto, and Giotto is one of the few artists 
whom he criticised, against whom he was never 
betrayed into saying a single disparaging word. 
It was to him that Ruskin traced the guiding and 
originating principle of Florentine art. Giotto's 
life was romantic, even legendary, but there is 
something ^of the inner spirit of beauty in all 
that came from his hand. Moreover there is a 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 6i 

strong and impressive intellectual quality in all 
that he did — the same sort of quality which 
comes out in Lionardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. 
One feels in all Giotto's work the pressure of 
a vigorous mind, the presence of the fundamental 
brain-work, which Rossetti held to be the essence 
of the finest art ; he never falls into sentimentaHty 
or into monotony. There is something fresh and 
unexhausted about him, both in his choice of 
subjects, his handling of detail, and his power 
of contrast. All this was deeply congenial to 
Ruskin ; and must not forget this episode of his 
life, because here his power of detecting serene 
greatness in art, and presenting it faithfully and 
impartially, without bitterness and undue depreci- 
ation, comes out most strongly. 

At this time too, in 1854, was inaugurated the 
Working Men's College, the theory of which was to 
bring the serener sort of academic culture within 
reach of working men. But this was all part of the 
great Chartist movement, which Charles Kingsley, 
F. D. Maurice, Tom Hughes, and Carlyle did 
so much to welcome, and to guide into peace- 
ful channels. Ruskin joined the Pre-Raphaelites 
in the inception of the idea ; he subscribed 
largely, he lectured, he taught drawing, and for 



62 RUSKIN 

four years he was perhaps the chief inspiring 
force of the College. His reasons for severing 
his connection with the work were given some 
years later in a letter to Maurice. 

" It is not," he wrote, " from any failure in my 
interest in this class that I have ceased from 
personal attendance. But I ascertained beyond 
all question that the faculty which my own method 
of teaching chiefly regarded, was necessarily absent 
in men trained to mechanical toil, that my words 
and thoughts respecting beautiful things were un- 
intelligible when the eye had been accustomed to 
the frightfulness of modern city life." 

The episode is interesting, as denoting his 
change of front and his broadening of horizon. 
Till now he had been rather a brilliant indi- 
vidualist than anything else. But he began to 
turn in the direction of social reform ; he began 
to see that the hope of the future lay in the 
education of the democracy. The problem of the 
divergence of class interests and class feelings 
began to concern him ; and he saw that what 
was needed was that the Vv^ealthier class, who 
had hitherto possessed a sort of monopoly of cul- 
ture, should come forward personally, and give 
freely whatever of taste and beauty and inspiring 
motive they possessed ; not in a condescend- 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 63 

ing and patronising spirit, doling out attractive 
selections of cheap culture, but sharing generously 
and freely the good things which society had 
hitherto conspired to secure only to the rich 
and leisured classes. Ruskin began to perceive 
that the fortune which his father secured him 
was in the main neither more nor less than a sub- 
scription levied from the labours of those through 
whose uncheered toil the fortune was made. 

F. D. Maurice, for all his deep conscientiousness 
and generosity of purpose, was not an ideal head 
for such a movement ; he was an essentially 
puzzle-headed man. Ruskin said of him that 
he reconciled Biblical difficulties by turning them 
upside down, like railway cushions. He arrived 
at orthodoxy, not by the direct road, but by 
labyrinthine paradoxes. On one occasion Maurice, 
who was a strict Sabbatarian, was asked what 
he felt about the opening of museums on Sunday. 
It was thought that he was cornered for once, 
and would have to give a plain answer. But 
Maurice was equal to the dilemma. He said 
that museums should certainly be opened on 
Sundays, but he trusted that working men would 
have too much respect for the Sabbath to think 
of frequenting them ! 



64 RUSKIN 

All this time Ruskin was throwing off books 
with marvellous celerity. Indeed the incred- 
ible amount of finished literary work, which 
he combined with indefatigable drawing, minera- 
logical study, teaching, and lecturing, shows 
the wonderful vitality which was half the secret 
of his force. He recuperated from one sort of 
toil by another : and I would not have you 
overlook the gigantic industry of the man ! His 
work seems and was so facile, that one is apt 
to forget in what urgency of stress it was 
done. 

The Elements of Drawing — a masterpiece of clear 
statement and logical expression — belongs to this 
date ; and also The Harbours of England, which 
is a patriotic prose poem of the loftiest and most 
resounding eloquence. He began, too, his annual 
Notes on the Academy Exhibition, and he was 
hard at work arranging and selecting the mass 
of Turner's studies and drawings which had been 
left to the nation. There were nearly 20,000 
of these, rolled up into great cylinders, rammed 
into drawers, stuffed into bulging portfolios, many 
of them drawn on both sides of the paper ; and 
the whole damp, dusty, and neglected. All the 
time, too, he was at work on the last volume of 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 65 

Modern Painters^ of which the final fifth volume 
appeared in i860. 

/^The work of one of these years is well summarised 
in a letter written to Mrs. Carlyle in the autumn of 
1855, which conveys a singularly vivid picture of 
the restless brain with all its schemes and ideas, ^/ 

He begins by saying that he has written some 
six hundred pages since the spring, and that he 
has great hopes of disturbing the public peace 
in various directions by what he has to suggest. 
He has also prepared, he says, thirty drawings 
for the engravers, some of which he has him- 
self etched, and all of which he has retouched. 
He has been reading up various subjects, such 
as German Metaphysics, Political Economy, 
Cookery, Music, Geology, Dress, Horticulture, 
and Education. He has been sketching in the 
open air, designing a window, learning Spanish. 
He has drawn up a new system of Botany, on 
his own lines, an^ re-arranged his collection of 
Minerals. /But perhaps the main interest of the 
letter is his confession that he has discovered 
that all previous theories of Political Economy 
are wrong, and that he is engaged in an inde- 
pendent investigation of the nature of Wealth/ 

The letter shows clearly enough the drift of 
Ruskin's mind in the direction of social pro- 

E 



66 RUSKIN 

blems ; but it is mainly interesting as illustrating 
the perilous activity of his brain. No doubt the 
fact that he varied his studies, and interspersed 
a good deal of mechanical handiwork, relieved 
the strain to a certain extent ; but it is a revela- 
tion of great restlessness, and of a furious appetite 
for mental occupation, which presages disaster. 

Of course there are plenty of people in the 
world who work hard, and work continuously ; 
mechanical labour, either of brain or hand, un- 
doubtedly makes for health and sanity ; but the 
danger with Ruskin was the emotional strain 
involved. He could not keep his thoughts to 
himself, and be content to accumulate his studies 
quietly and stolidly. He was forced to share 
his opinions, and to confute received theories ; 
and it was here that the difficulty lay. He was 
always occupied in a sort of mental strategy, 
conducting a campaign against complacent ortho- 
doxy. His persuasive charm carried his own 
circle to a great extent along with him ; but he 
formed his owa theories hastily, and expressed 
them strongly ; and though it is perhaps safe to 
say that all stereotyped opinion is erroneous, 
because it is essential to the life of ideas that 
they should grow and develop, yet the expansion 
of thought needs a combination of patience and 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 67 

exactness, which Riiskin seldom attained ; and the 
battle, in a sense, cost him his life. 

4 
And here I may say a few words about the 
later volumes of Modern Painters. They did 
little more than expand and reiterate the prin- 
ciples originally laid down. The third volume 
is really a collection of scattered essays on art. 
It begins with an essay on the Grand style, or 
Dignity in art, in which, with infinite variety of 
illustration, the somewhat indisputable proposition 
is stated that you can tell greatness of style by 
the greatness of an artist ; and if you want to 
go further and detect the greatness of an artist, 
the only way to arrive at it is through the great- 
ness of his style. There is a delightful chapter 
on the Grotesque in Art, and a famous chapter 
on the Pathetic Fallacy, the point being that we 
are apt to put human emotion behind natural 
forces — to think of the storm as angry, of the 
sea as cruel, of the sunlight as beneficent, and 
of the pestilence as malignant. Whereas the 
truth is that even the pestilence has no malicious 
intent. It is merely so many colonies of vigorous 
bacteria hard at work enjoying themselves in con- 
genial circumstances. The result is the decimation 



68 RUSKIN 

of human society, and the discomfort of many 
individuals ; but the bacteria in question are think- 
ing, if they reflect at all, about their own eugenics 
and their own social development, and not the least 
about the bereavements they unintentionally cause. 
There is too a good deal of dogmatism about 
poetry, which is little more than a justification of 
Ruskin's own preferences, and show that he had 
but an imperfect appreciation of his subject y and 
there is much beautiful writing about the spirit of 
domestic landscape, tamed woodland and tilled 
field, and a wild plea to the nation not to anni- 
hilate time and space by steam./ 

And here I would draw atiention to a parti- 
cular limitation of Ruskiii/S, because it is strongly 
characteristic of him. ^/He spent himself at in- 
tervals in frantic objurgations of steam as abbre- 
viating leisurely travel, and as nullifying dignified 
and tranquil manual labour. /The fact is that 
here came out both his bourgeois tradition and 
his innate Toryism. The post-chaise and the 
travelling carriage represented to Ruskin the height 
of locomotive convenience ; but it is impossible to 
resist the conviction, that had he lived before 
horses had been used for purposes of locomotion, 
he would have passionately resisted their introduc- 
tion, as interfering with the natural dignity and 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 69 

appropriateness of pedestrianism. / Similarly had 
he been brought up to gain his early experiences 
of travel by railways, he would have copiously 
praised railway travelling as the natural and 
seemly method of voyaging, and would have spent 
himself in bitter diatribes against the impiety and 
horror of aerial navigation./ 

/So too with his hatred 6i steam as a mechanical 
force. He praised the human use of wind and 
water ; he wanted to do the work of the world 
by tide-mills ; the waterwheel and the windmill 
seemed to him to be comely and homely additions 
to the landscape./ But it is wholly unreasonable 
to dictate at what point human invention is to 
cease. The telephone is not more morally hateful 
and repugnant to the sense of dignity than the 
penny post ; and to be consistent, Ruskin should 
have insisted upon the disuse of all mechanical 
contrivances for shortening labour ; he should 
have implored men to bite and tear cloth instead 
of using scissors, and to till the earth with their 
hands instead of using spade and plough. He 
did not see that the one chance of giving men 
leisure in an over-populated community is to 
save mechanical and disheartening labour by 
every possible means ; and instead of raving 
against manufacturers for filling the air with 



70 RUSKIN 

sulphurous fumes and the earth with cinderheaps, 
he should have had the faith to see that all the 
turning of the forces of the earth to serve human 
life and security is a step in the direction of giving 
men time to cultivate higher pleasures and to 
follow finer pursuits. It is here that a certain 
childish petulance, amusing enough if it were 
not also so irritating, comes out in the man. 

The fourth volume of Modern Painters carries on 
the thought of the pictorial vision, of the right use 
of Mystery. Here Ruskin's love of strong paradox 
emerges ; together with his insistence on exactness 
of detail, comes such a statement as this : " All 
distinct drawing must be bad drawing, and . . . 
nothing can be right till it is unintelligible." 
" Excellence of the highest kind, without obscurity, 
cannot exist"; but this is qualified by the celebrated 
phrase, " the right of being obscure is not one 
to be lightly claimed." It may be asked what 
coherent theory of art can be deduced from these 
contradictions ? The answer is that they are all 
true statements ; and the mistake lay not in the 
statements, but in the fact that Ruskin began by 
dogmatising, and that his view of the possibilities 
of art widened, through simple experience, as he 
wrote. A less positive man, a man less determined 
to teach and to uphold a theory, might have aban- 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 71 

doned the task in despair, on finding that a larger 
experience of art made havoc of earlier theories. 
But Ruskin did not do this ; he merely enunciated 
his later discoveries just as decisively as he had 
announced his previous discoveries, heedless, and 
rightly heedless, that the new patch tore the old 
garment to tatters. But the new dicta enlarged 
the old. What broke in pieces was the old 
exclusive theory. But the only people who are 
the worse for that are those who go to Ruskin for 
a scientific statement of the ultimate principles of 
art. His statement is throughout poetical and 
rhetorical, suggestive rather than exhaustive ; and 
ywhile Ruskin did not attain at any explanation or 
synthesis of art, he did contrive to present a 
splendid analysis of it, and disentangled much that 
was profoundly interesting and true about the 
motives of art and its sources of inspiration./ 

The rest of the volume is mostly taken up with 
the subject of Mountains in art, and is a direct 
study of nature ; and here again he tried to probe 
too deeply, and attempted to attribute to the effects 
of natural scenery the dispositions and emotions 
of those who inhabit mountainous country, the 
causes of which lie far deeper than the mere slope 
of ledge and ridge, the sweep of mist and the noise 
of falling streams. 



72 RUSKIN 

The fifth volume is a further study of landscape, 
treating of tree and leaf, of cloud and sea, and 
ends with a fine summary of the aims and execu- 
tions of great landscape schools ; and here we may 
note the singular and almost pettish exclusion of the 
noble school of modern French landscape painters, 
such as Corot and Millet, which he names with 
bated breath, and with a sort of shuddering horror. 
The cause, we may safely affirm, that he knew 
nothing of these painters, and had not studied 
them. The book returns to a great panegyric upon 
Turner, and a burst of passionate grief that he was 
so little appreciated and understood in his lifetime. 

And so the great book draws to an end ; and 
surveying it all as we can do, after an interval of 
fifty years, we can see that, though it fails in its 
argument, though its effect upon art was in a way 
misleading, because it only substituted one con- 
vention for another, and overbore a serene adopted 
tradition of admiration for certain received forms 
of art by a passionate individual preference, yet it 
did something which it never set out to do. Only 
recently has art recovered from the despotism of 
Ruskin ; it has learnt that he was right, but not 
exclusively right. We have come to see that art 
must find its own path, and cannot run meekly in 
prescribed channels ; and we have learnt too, that 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 73 

the victory lies with those who can see for them- 
selves, and admire and love, rather than with those 
who can repeat the dicta of critics, and belittle 
and despise. y 

But it has done far more than that/ It has put 
art in quite a different position, not as the indolent 
privilege of a few but as the stirring inheritance of 
many ; and it has shown too that art, as well as 
morality and religion, is one of the many stairways 
that lead men out of the pit of materialism to the 
higher and purer glories of mind and spirit ; that 
life must be a choice and a battle ; and that the 
spiritual nature can only grow by exercise and 
endeavour ; and that an indolent surrender to 
mere sensuous experience in art is as dangerous to 
the soul as an unrestrained sensualism to the body. / 

All this is presented not only with a match- 
less vigour and courage, but with a style that 
now thunders like a falling cataract, and now 
croons as sweetly as a dove hidden among trees ; 
a style that can scathe with fiery invective, 
and stab with piercing truth, that can rouse as 
with martial music on a day of battle, and can in 
a moment be as the thought of one who saunters, 
full of joy, in a day of early spring, among the 
daffodils and windflowers of an English copse. 
And then in a moment comes a touch of exquisite 



74 RUSKIN 

pathos, or of lambent irony, or of that deHcious 
humour that shows how closely akin laughter 
is to tears. Nothing is so notable about the 
book as its swift transitions, which give no sense 
of an interrupted mood or of an ungoverned 
vagueness of thought, but which just draw the 
mind onwards, with a sense of true companion- 
ship, so that one shares alike the joy and the 
sorrow of the writer, and finds both beautiful. 

5 

Before I leave this period I must mention a letter 
which Ruskin wrote to Professor Norton from 
Venice in 1859. It has this special interest — that 
he was on the verge of a great crisis, and it was 
almost the last thing he ever wrote in the old self- 
confident manner. I confess that there is to 
me in the letter a hint of strain, almost of shrill- 
ness, as of one whose nerves are strung too 
highly ; and in the tense and almost exaggerated 
humour of the whole, there is a touch of what 
the Scotch call " fey " — a kind of feverish gaiety 
on the edge of the shadow, presaging calamity. 

He describes himself as the victim of all kinds 
of " provocations " — frostbitten fingers, impatient 
gondoliers, unpunctual sacristans and servants, 
bells, wind, rain, tides, and mud. It is clear 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 75 

that he was working very hard, and always on 
the edge of great irritability ; but the letter is 
more interesting still for another reason, which 
I can only explain by a parable. 

We must all know — perhaps we realise it more 
as we grow older — a curious sense, partly amusing 
and partly pathetic, which arises on seeing a child 
absolutely intent and absorbed in some self-chosen 
occupation or game, which may seem to an older 
person extraordinarily trivial or wearisome, yet 
which the child pursues day after day with un- 
abated persistence, though it interrupts his rela- 
tions with others and renders him apparently, for 
the time being, oblivious of affection and even 
emotion. 

This letter of Ruskin's gives me the same 
mixed sense of pathos and of amusement. There 
is at the surface the freakish kind of humour over 
it all, which shows how easily he could stand out- 
side of himself, and see the absurdity of his pet- 
tishness. Then there comes in the pathos of it ; 
and this I think resides in the wonder that he 
could have thought what he was doing to be 
really important ! Of course one must not in 
this world throw away lightly treasures of accumu- 
lated beauty and tradition, and still less sacrifice 
it all ruthlessly to brutal indifferences or mere 



76 RUSKIN 

material conveniences. But to feel about any 
human handiwork as Ruskin was feeling then is 
extravagant, and faithless as well. It can only 
be excused if one really feels that the human race 
has exhausted its possibilities of beautiful con- 
ception and delineation. Perhaps the strongest 
reason why the artistic expression of our time 
seems weak and faltering is because we have lost 
our hearts too much to the ancient beauty of 
art and song ; and despairing of ever regaining 
that sweet early fragrance, that almost childlike 
delight of untrammelled utterance, we have lived 
too much in retrospect, and too little in touch 
with the marching age. 

I do feel that there is something unreal and 
unbalanced in these half-frienzied laments over 
what the world takes away, laments not counter- 
balanced by any apparent belief or hope that life 
was giving or holding in store anything of beauty 
that could replace or supersede the old ! 

And then too there runs through the whole 
letter the sense that Ruskin is only writing of the 
outer life after all ; that it is more or less make- 
believe ; that he is endeavouring to persuade him- 
self and others that his life is active, enthusiastic, 
vivid, lived in eager ecstasy with forms and 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 77 

colours ; while all the while one seems to distin- 
guish beyond and beneath all this laughter and 
emphatic talk, some dark current of desolate 
waters, a tide deriving its motion and ebb from 
forces far removed from earth and things trivial, 
from the pulse of some vast, cold, gleaming thing 
moving silently in the abyss, which was bearing 
away this frail and delicate spirit for all its well- 
bred excitement and fine enthusiasm on a very 
different journey and to a voyage of which the 
end might not be known. 

It is the presence of this deep-seated suspicion 
in Ruskin's mind, hardly even consciously realised, 
that he had been hitherto pursuing the wrong 
thoughts and the shallow things which gives, I 
believe, the curious ring to his letters about this 
time. One sees him trying to lift, or in some 
cases to pull down, the curtains of his mind, to 
enlighten, or to beguile his nearest and dearest 
friends ; and I will therefore quote two extracts 
from letters, in his own most intimate and 
confiding strain, which show what was going 
on in the innermost stronghold of his mind and 
heart. Moreover these two letters, written before 
the great change and crisis of his life, gain much 
in interest and significance by being written to 



78 RUSKIN 

the two great poets of the age, Robert Browning 
and Tennyson. 

The first was written in January 1859, and not 
to Browning only, but to his wife as well. 

" I am much helped by all you say in your 
letters — being apt, in spite of all my certainty of 
being right in the main, to be seized with great 
fits of vexation — for the truth is that my own 
proper business is not that of writing ; I am 
never happy as I write ; never want to utter for 
my own delight, as you singers do (with all your 
pretences to benevolence and all that, you know 
you like singing just as well as the nightingales). 
But I'm truly benevolent, miserably benevolent. 
For my own pleasure I should be collecting stones 
and mosses, drying and ticketing them — reading 
scientific books — walking all day long in the 
summer — going to plays, and what not, in 
winter — never writing nor saying a word — rejoic- 
ing tranquilly or intensely in pictures, in music, 
in pleasant faces, in kind friends. But now — 
about me there is thus terrific absurdity and 
wrong going on. People kill my Turner with 
abuse of him — make rifle targets of my Paul 
Veroneses — make themselves, and me, unendur- 
ably wretched by all sorts of ridiculous doings 
— won't let me be quiet. I live the life of an 
old lady in a houseful of wicked children — can 
do nothing but cry out — they won't leave me to 
my knitting-needles a moment. And this work- 
ing in a way contrary to one's whole nature tells 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 79 

upon one at last — people never were meant to do 
it. They were meant to be able to give quiet 
pieces of advice to each other, and show, without 
any advice, how things should be done properly 
(such as they had gift and liking for). But people 
were never meant to be always howling and bawl- 
ing the right road to a generation of drunken 
cabmen, their heads up through the trapdoor of 
the hansom, faces all over mud — no right road 
to be got upon after all — nothing but a drunken 
effort at turning, ending in ditch. I hope to 
get just one more howl executed, from which I 
hope great effects — upon the moon — and then, 
see if I don't take to kennel and straw, comfort- 
ably." 

And then there is the letter to Tennyson, who 
had just sent Ruskin a present of his Idylls. 

" I am not sure," he says, " but I feel the art 
and finish in these poems a little more than I 
like to feel it. ... As a description of various 
nobleness and tenderness the book is without 
price ; but I shall always wish it had been noble- 
ness independent of a romantic condition of ex- 
ternals in general. 

" In Mernoriam, Maudj The Miller's Daughter^ and 
such-like will always be my own pet rhymes, 
but I am quite prepared to admit this to be as 
good as any, for its own peculiar audience. 
Treasures of wisdom there are in it, and word- 
painting such as never was yet for concentration : 
nevertheless it seems to me that so great power 



8o RUSKIN 

ought not to be spent on visions of things past, 
but on the Hving present. For one hearer 
capable of feeling the depth of this poem, I 
believe ten would feel a depth quite as great if 
the stream flowed through things nearer the 
hearer. And merely in the facts of modern life — 
not drawing-room, formal life, but the far-away 
and quite unknown growth of souls in and 
through any form of misery or servitude — there 
is an infinity of what men should be told, and 
what none but a poet can tell. I cannot but 
think that the intense, masterful, and unerring 
transcript of an actuality, and the relation of a 
story of any real human life, as a poet would 
watch and analyse it, would make all men feel 
more or less what poetry was, as they felt what 
Life and Fate were in their instant workings. . . . 
The feeling continually weighs upon me, day by 
day, more and more, that not the grief of the world 
but the loss of it is the wonder of it. I see 
creatures so full of all power and beauty, with 
none to understand or teach or save them. The 
making in them of miracles, and all cast away, 
for ever lost, as far as we can trace. And no 
' in memoriam.' " 

Before I say a word about the thought in these 
two memorable letters, I would wish you to notice 
what an example they are of the extraordinary 
sensitiveness of Ruskin's mind, in the delicate 
reflection they give, in style and language, of the 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 8i 

persons to whom they were written. It is not 
fanciful to see in the quick, broken, allusive letter 
to the Brownings — even in the constant omission 
of the article, that the very texture of the letter was 
being coloured, as it was being written, by imagi- 
native sympathy with the method of thought and 
expression of the recipients. And then in the 
Tennyson letter, the same effect is observable, in 
the solemn and stately cadences into which the 
sentences fall. They are both letters to people 
as well as letters from a person. 

And then observe how the whole ebb of thought 
is running, swiftly and surely, away from old 
beauty and sweet dreams of peace, towards the 
cataract of modern needs and problems ! He 
is turning his back on the past ; he is engrossed 
in the present. In the Browning letter, indeed, 
in spite of all its tenderness and humour, there 
peeps out what I cannot but call the ugly part 
of Ruskin's mind — the tendency to blame and 
censure, to feel that every one else is on the wrong 
tack, and that he himself is divinely appointed 
to set them right. There is a deep-seated im- 
patience and irritability about it, which I cannot 
praise. It may be said that the pure-hearted 

clear-sighted man has a right not to be what is 

F 



82 RUSKIN 

horribly called mealy-mouthed. But it reminds 
me, for all that, of the thankless servant in the 
parable, who had been forgiven a great debt, 
and went out from his Lord's presence to harry 
his own humble debtors. It may be, as I have 
heard it plausibly urged, that the servant was 
actuated by a severe sense of honesty, and desired 
to pay back perhaps a halfpenny in the pound. 
But he had mistaken the meaning of forgiveness 
for all that! 

And thus the letter to Tennyson strikes a 
humbler and a greater note — the sorrow of the 
waste of the world, and " the unknown growth 
of souls in and through any form of misery and 
servitude." He was close upon the prison-door 
himself, where he was to learn the sharp lesson 
of the awfulness of humbled pride ; he was to 
learn that each man's life is a mystery, a secret 
between himself and God — a secret not to be 
plumbed by confident eyes, and a mystery not 
to be made plain by any clearest stream of 
human eloquence. And here I leave him, at the 
threshold of the dark doorway. 



LECTURE III 



And now in Ruskin's fortieth year, when he had 
lived out half his days, there came the cardo 
rerum, the hinge of destiny, of which the Roman 
poets speak, and this strange vivid life turned 
slowly on its pivot. I think that this is the 
right moment to look backwards and to look 
forwards. The earlier current of his life may 
be said to interpret itself, like a bright stream of 
living water, rippling lightly enough in woodland 
places, with here and there a fall and a water- 
break, yet passing easily enough by sunny pools 
and shining reaches. But now there comes a 
change, and at first sight a tragic change, so 
much so, indeed, that it wants a few words of 
preparation. 

Let me look backwards first. And I would 
say that we cannot make a greater mistake or 
an easier mistake, in reading the record of a great 

life, than to credit its earlier moods and passages 

83 



84 RUSKIN 

with something of the glory and greatness that 
crowned its close. We think of the earlier days 
of famous men as in some way gilded and 
decorated with the trophies of renown, the path 
made easier to tread, inspirited by approval and 
applause. The exact reverse is generally the 
case. Many great men who have died early 
have never had the consciousness of fame at all. 
Keats, for instance, was to himself and his friends 
an indolent and consumptive poetaster, without 
money or prospects. Shelley was a man banned 
and branded in respectable society, a byword 
for fantastic immorality, a crank, and worse than 
a crank. /Luskin himself, had he died at this 
date, would have been little more than a very 
brilliant and rather fantastic art-critic, enabled 
by his wealth to live an artistic life, and to indulge 
in heterodox and unusual views, master of a fine 
eloquent style, and with leisure to evolve an 
elaborate and rather inconclusive theory of d.vi.// 
He was known too by a few as a man of great 
social charm, whimsical, humorous and sympa- 
thetic. He had fame, of course, of a kind, but 
not the sort of renown which came to him later. 
Perhaps a few clear-sighted people saw that 
there was something nobler and richer behind, 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 85 

and suspected that he was speaking, under 
symbols of art, of something larger and more 
vital than the appreciation of style in architecture 
and painting. And then if we look at the man 
himself, there is hitherto something unreason- 
able, over-vehement, inconsiderate about it all. 
/He had arrived at his conclusions by instinct, 
and believed that he had attained them by reason./ 
He had been brought up in a narrow and 
secluded atmosphere ; his mother an uncom- 
promising Puritan, his father a man of deferential 
artistic tastes, with a dim consciousness of 
thwarted powers, and energies devoted to an 
unromantic trade, successful enough in a shy 
sort of way, yet with a dumb resentment against 
life which he was too proud to admit. Ruskin 
was hitherto the creature of circumstance. /He 
had been trained as a moralist and as a con- 
noisseur ;/his eye absorbed in critical observation, 
his hand versed in delineation,/ and his mind 
set upon dominating opinion and regulating 
morality. / He had taken his innate Puritanism into 
his criticism, and had tried to conform the lawless- 
ness of art to the dictates of Evangelical morality./ 
He had had his troubles, but they had not 
borne fruit ; he had escaped from them into 



86 RUSKIN 

his own walled and moated paradise ; he had 
lived for himself, though quite willing to help other 
people, as he confessed, if it did not interfere 
with his own comfort ; and he had displayed a 
bigoted and self-centred temper. There is little 
that is wise or noble about the man hitherto. 
It had been a career of unbroken success of a 
small and self-centred kind ; his genius had 
showed itself in his incredible laboriousness, and 
in a vitality of immense elasticity and toughness. 
But not by these things is the world changed ! 

And now he was to be given a new heart. He 
was to see and to feel ; he was to be mocked 
and derided ; he was to wrestle with hateful 
thoughts ; he was to torment himself over the evils 
of society ; he was to build up an elaborate scheme 
for its amelioration. His scheme was to fail, and 
not even to fail nobly ; it was not only to be 
viewed with indifference, but with open ridicule and 
contempt. He was at first just kindly silenced, 
and bidden to concern himself with his art, sent 
back like a child to its toys ; and when he per- 
sisted, he was to be called crazy and fantastic. 
And worse still, he was to bear one of the 
heaviest trials that can fall to the lot of man ; 
he was to pass into the delirious shadow-world 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 87 

of insanity, to be mocked by his own visions, 
in that awful twilight-land in which a man cannot 
distinguish between truth and hallucination. He 
was to fix his pure affections with all the fiery 
intensity of a virginal nature upon a girl far 
younger than himself, and he was to be rejected 
on grounds of the narrow Evangelicalism which 
he had once preached, and of which he had 
burst the bonds. The sights and sounds of 
earth, the pageantry of art, in which he had 
lived so delicately and so strenuously, were to 
become mere mocking echoes and scornful voices, 
taunting him with a joy he could no longer 
feel ; and he was to struggle on, with the tempest 
beating over him in crash after crash, until his 
own sweet utterance was quenched, and he was 
forced into silence and inaction. He was to fade 
into imbecility and invalidism, petted and soothed 
tenderly enough, but with the thwarted and pent- 
up energy breaking out into irritable bitterness and 
angry suspicion. He who had seen so clearly, 
had judged so rigidly, and had delivered so 
peremptory a message, was to learn that there 
was a stronger force still, and that God had a 
will and a way of His own, larger and mightier, 
but at the same time infinitely more dilatory and 



88 RUSKIN 

labyrinthine than the scheme which the prophet 
would have enforced. He was to learn to the 
full the awful forces of stupidity and prejudice, 
of self-interest and baseness, of cruelty and 
injustice, which made hourly and daily havoc of 
life and joy. He did not learn to endure this 
or to acquiesce in it, but he was to be bewildered 
and afflicted with the sorrow of the soul that 
sees what is amiss, but is helpless to stop it 
or to amend it. Yet he was to become, without 
knowing it, in his humiliation and pain, more 
august, more pathetic, more noble, more divine, 
till he was to appear in the minds of all who 
cared for purity and goodness and beauty, like 
a seamed and scarred mountain peak, above the 
peaceful valleys, cold and lonely and isolated, 
and yet looking out across the fields of life to 
some awful sunrise of truth, climbing and glim- 
mering over shining tracts and unknown seas. 

There have been men of genius, men like 
Browning and Wordsworth, whose life, but for 
some natural sorrows temperately borne, have 
been a joyful and equable progress from strength 
to strength. But as a rule the penalty or the 
privilege of genius is to sorrow more bitterly, to 
labour more sternly than other men ; to torment 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 89 

itself beyond endurance over the woes that seem 
so tamely and trivially incurred, which it is power- 
less to alter. Not to know fame till it is valueless, 
and to find renown the poorest of flimsy shields 
against the stings of self-reproach and the agonies 
of conscious failure. Is there one here — I hope 
with all my heart that there is more than one — 
who seeks not vainly or meanly, like the Apostles 
of old, a seat of glory in the kingdom of God ? 
If so, he must be prepared to drink of the bitter 
cup, and to find the crown a crown of thorns. It 
is sweet and seemly, dtdce et decorum, to desire to 
deserve fame, and natural enough to desire it 
whether it be deserved or no. But it is higher 
still to put that all aside ! 

And now there settled upon Ruskin's mind a 
kind of cloud : who shall say how much of it was 
experience and thought, how much of it the 
exhaustion of eager work and faculties over- 
strained ? /After he had thus exultantly and with 
intensity of conviction expressed his joy in art, he 
began to wonder why it was that others did not 
see what he saw, did not admire and enjoy what 
he admired and enjoyed. At first, in his earlier 
writings, one can see the belief, the youthful 
behef, I must add, which animated him. He 



90 RUSKIN 

took for granted that the spirit which loved and 
admired and welcomed beauty, and drank at its 
springs, was there in humanity, but as the years 
went on, he began to see that it was not so./ He 
saw that, all the world over, the majority of the 
human race had no care or love for these things 
at all. He had believed that human beings were 
dull, only because they admired, or tried to admire, 
the wrong things, and he had thought that they 
had only to be shown the right things to admire 
and love them. But he found that people were at 
heart indifferent, and worse than indifferent ; that 
the world was full of ugly desires and low delights ; 
that men were selfish and cruel and sensual ; that 
they loved wealth and comfort and display ; that 
many people lived from childhood to age under 
the shadow of base influences and devastating 
tyrannies ; and so he began to see that if they 
were to admire and love what was pure and 
noble, it was not enough just to point out the 
work of great artists, but the nature of man must 
be somehow purged and changed. And then he 
began to speculate as to the causes of all this 
baseness and ugliness, and, as I say, a shadow 
crept over him. He had been fond of society 
and friendship and comfortable domestic life ; 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 91 

but now he withdrew into solitude and sad reflec- 
tion. He lived much alone in the Alps brooding 
and meditating over the darkness of the world. 
In February, 1861, he wrote to a friend : — 

" I was in terrible doubt as to what to do for a 
long time this last summer and winter. It seemed 
to me that to keep any clearheadedness, free 
from intellectual trouble and other pains, no life 
would do for me but one as like Veronese's as 
might be, and I was seriously, and despairingly, 
thinking of going to Paris or Venice and breaking 
away from all modern society and opinion, and 
doing I don't know what. Intense scorn of all I 
had hitherto done or thought, still intenser scorn 
of other people's doings and thinkings, especially 
in religion . . . and almost unendurable solitude 
in my own home, only made more painful to me 
by parental love which did not and never could 
help me, and which was cruelly hurtful without 
knowing it ; and terrible discoveries in the course 
of such investigations as I made into grounds of 
old faith — were all concerned in this . . yKs for 
things that have influenced me, I believe hard 
work, love of justice and of beauty, good-nature 
and great vanity, have done all of me that was worth 
doing. I've had my heart broken, ages ago, when 
I was a boy — then mended, cracked, beaten in, 
kicked about old corridors, and finally, I think, 
flattened fairly out."/ 

But he was to go down deeper yet into sorrow. 



92 RUSKIN 

In March, 1863, he wrote from Mornex to his 
friend Norton : — 

" The loneliness is very great, and the peace in 
which I am at present ... is only as if I had 
buried myself in a tuft of grass on a battlefield 
wet with blood — for the cry of the earth about me 
is in my ears continually if I do not lay my head 
to the very ground." 

And to similar effect a few months later : — 

'^ I am still very unwell, and tormented between 
the longing for rest and for lovely life, and the 
sense of the terrific call of human crime for 
resistance, and of human misery for help — though 
it seems to me as the voice of a river of blood 
which can but sweep me down in the midst of its 
black clots, helpless." 

Moreover he saw that, though much of the 
havoc was wrought by men who were consciously 
selfish and tyrannical, yet the worst horrors of 
the system were perpetuated by kindly orthodox 
and respectable people, who enjoyed their com- 
forts, and never troubled their head as to what 
lay behind, nor reflected how many lives of cheer- 
less labour were sacrificed, that they might fare 
delicately and sleep comfortably. 'And here one 
begins to see a hint of the true genius of the 
man, in his power not of sorrowing mildly and 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 93 

ineffectively over evils that he could not mend, 
but in his povi^er of tormenting himself over the 
troubles of others, his determination to sacrifice 
himself and his fame to mending what he could, 
his resolution to use his power and his position 
to make plain the bitter truth, and to summon 
all true and brave and compassionate spirits to 
join him in a desperate crusade against the evils 
and miseries of the world, /f 

And now he suffered the pain of finding him- 
self utterly withdrawn in spirit from the familiar 
circle. His parents could not understand what 
he was about, or why he should desert the path 
of easy triumph and respectable display for a 
lonely and thorny path among brambles and 
stones. What made it worse was that his con- 
fident temper, his sense of right vision and just 
judgment, seemed to hand him instantly the key to 
these mysteries. /With Ruskin to see a problem 
was to see the solution of it. The difticulties 
melted away, the obstacles vanished. It was the 
stupidity of the world that brought about the 
mischief, not its malevolence or its indifference. / 
He had but to point out the truth, and all well- 
meaning and reasonable people would see and 
follow it. So he prepared his lantern again, and 



94 RUSKIN 

this time its flame was fed with far different 
hopes and desires. / 

2 

Even as late as the year i860, which is the year 
of the great change in Ruskin's mind, his whole 
ideal of life was a hopeful one. He gave evidence 
in that year before a Committee of the House 
of Commons on Public Institutions, in which he 
spoke of his schemes for educating and instruct- 
ing the labouring classes, and noted in them a 
" thirsty desire " for culture and improvement. 
But this was really the flicker of an expiring 
flame, and was said more to persuade himself 
that it was so, than because he really believed 
it to be so. He was in the summer of that year 
at Chamonix ; but he did httle drawing, except 
in a half-hearted and distracfed way. He walked 
much in the pine-woods, and was thinking out 
a set of papers, which he wrote with infinite care, 
and read aloud to his companions at the break- 
fast-table. The problem he had at heart was 
a social one. It was no less than an attempt 
to analyse the meaning of the word wealth, and 
to give a logical definition of it. And as this book 
and the next that he wrote were considered by 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 95 

him to be the most important and valuable con- 
tributions he ever made to literature ; and as 
also the ideas he promulgated have become in 
many ways familiar to and accepted by the 
present generation, it will be as well to pay 
careful attention to them. Now I am very far 
from saying or believing that these ideas were 
invented or originated by Ruskin. That is not 
the way in which great ideas spring up. They 
arise, I believe, naturally, by a perfectly inevitable 
development in the minds of a generation. They 
are talked about, hinted at, thought about, half 
enunciated by a great many speakers and writers ; 
and then some one author of force and position 
focusses the scattered rays, and a definite school 
of thought springs up. 

The title Ruskin gave his book was Unto this 
Last. It is taken from the words of the parable 
about the labourers in the vineyard, who at the 
end of the day were all paid alike — " I will give 
unto this last even as unto thee." His idea 
was roughly thus — and here I would say that 
I am following closely Mrs. Meynell's masterly 
analysis of the book — that wages of labour should 
be a fixed thing, not varying according to compe- 
tition. He said that soldiers and sailors, govern- 



96 RUSKIN 

ment officials, railway-men, servants, and school- 
masters received fixed wages, varying more by 
the importance of their work than by its actual 
quality ; and that moreover revolutionary and 
socialistic ideas did not spread among people 
thus paid, while they did spread among people 
whose wages varied in sympathy with commercial 
competition. If this was so, why, he asked 
should not labour be paid on the same lines ? 
He maintained that the work of people paid 
on fixed lines did not suffer in quality because 
of the comparative sense of security ; that the 
unnatural thing was that the bad workman should 
be able to offer his work at a lower price, so 
as to undersell the good workman ; and that the 
natural course was to regulate this, not to leave 
it unregulated. He believed that the inequalities of 
employment, the feverish over-production of One 
period, and the languid under-production of another, 
would be harmonised and tranquillised by the 
regulation of wages, while education would tend to 
diminish the number of bad workmen. He 
thought too that the employers would come to 
realise the administrative nature of their functions, 
like the lawyer and the bishop and the statesman, 
and regard themselves as servants of the State, 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 97 

whose duty was to provide and supply commodi- 
ties, rather than as men aiming at grabbing what 
profit they could at the expense of the community. 
He held that the commercial system was based 
upon the art of keeping others poor, if possible ; 
and that people were misled by seeing a class 
enriched into thinking that the community was 
therefore richer. The economists of the day 
maintained that demand and supply could not 
be controlled by human legislation. To this 
Ruskin replied : " Precisely in the same sense 
. . . the waters of the world go where they are 
required. Where the land falls the water flows. 
. . . But the disposition and the administration 
. . . can be altered by human forethought." 

Of course this is all really socialistic, because it 
is opposed to irresponsible individualistic forces, 
such as competition and monopoly ; but Ruskin 
maintained that he was a Free Trader, though 
on grounds wholly opposed to the popular 
theories of Free Trade. He went on to define 
wealth as the possession of a large stock of 
useful articles which we can use ; and his plea 
was for publicity about all commercial dealing. 
"The general law," he writes, "respecting just 
or economical exchange is simply this : there 



98 RUSKIN 

must be advantage on both sides (or if only 
advantage on one, at least no disadvantage on the 
other) . . . and just payment for his time, intelli- 
gence, and labour to any intermediate person 
effecting the transaction. . . . And whatever 
advantage there is on either side, and whatever 
pay is given to the intermediate person, should 
be thoroughly known." 

His main solution was this. " Not greater wealth, 
but simpler pleasure. . , . Waste nothing and 
grudge nothing. Care in nowise to make more of 
money, but care to make much of it ; remem- 
bering always the great, palpable, inevitable fact 
— that what one person has, another cannot 
have. . . . And if, on due and honest thought over 
these things, it seems that the kind of existence 
to which men are now summoned by every 
plea of pity and claim of right may, for some 
time at least, not be a luxurious one ; — consider 
whether, even supposing it guiltless, luxury could 
be desired by any of us, if we saw clearly at 
our sides the suffering which accompanies it 
in the world . . . the cruellest man living could 
not sit at his feast, unless he sat blindfold." 

Now does all this seem a fantastic dream, or 
does it seem, at this date, only a somewhat 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 99 

belated perception of obvious truths ? All this 
translated into modern English is but the prin- 
ciple of the living wage, the old age pension, 
public education, improved housing and com- 
pensation for improvements. These are all ideas 
upon which there is some difference of opinion, 
but the principles are familiar, and accepted by 
all reasonable people. 

Yet what was the reception of Ruskin's book ? 
He sent the papers to the Cornhill, of which his 
friend Thackeray was the editor. Three papers ap- 
peared ; and then Thackeray, writing frankly and 
kindly, said that they were so universally con- 
demned and disliked that he could only admit 
one more — and this to a man who was known 
as one of the most brilliant and popular writers of 
the day. He himself took his defeat very hard, 
and fell into great depression. "He sulked," 
he wrote of himself, through the winter, drawing 
a good deal, and working fitfully, but in enfeebled 
health. Later on in the following year he went 
off to Switzerland, and established himself in a 
little chalet near Geneva, two thousand feet up, 
at the end of all carriage roads. He thought of 
buying and restoring a fine old chateau. But he 
gave up the idea, saying " that he never had the 



100 RUSKIN 

gift, nor had he then the energy, to make any- 
thing of a place." So he rambled about and 
wrote a set of papers on political economy, now 
known as Mtniera Pulveris, which he sent to Froude, 
then editor of Fraser's Magazine. The result was 
even more disastrous than before. " Only a genius 
like Mr. Ruskin could have produced such hopeless 
rubbish," said a leading newspaper. His father, 
then not far from his end, spoke his mind in 
sorrow and bitterness ; not only did he hate 
the sacrifice of reputation involved, and the 
obloquy which resulted, but he thought the whole 
theory absurd and perverse. 

Carlyle, almost alone of his friends, stood by 
Ruskin. He said of the two books that he ap- 
proved of them in every particular ; that in every 
part of Unto this Last, just published in book form, 
he found " a high and noble sort of truth, not 
one doctrine that I can intrinsically dissent from 
or count other than salutary in the extreme, and 
pressingly needed in England above all." 

But the public would have none of it. The 
publisher of Fraser's told Froude flatly that the 
series must stop, and only four papers appeared. 
Carlyle, talking to Froude on the subject, said 
" that when Solomon's Temple was building it 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY loi 

was credibly reported that at least ten thousand 
sparrows sitting on the trees round declared 
that it was entirely wrong — quite contrary to re- 
ceived opinion — hopelessly condemned by public 
opinion, &c. Nevertheless it got finished, and 
the sparrows flew away and began to chirp in 
the same note about something else." 

3 
But all this helped Ruskin little. He fell into 
great despondency, which he tried to relieve 
by a study of Alpine Geology. And then a 
fresh sorrow fell upon him. His father died in 
1864. He showed his confidence in his son 
by bequeathing him a great fortune, ;^i 20,000 
in cash, besides much house property, and leav- 
ing the house and ;^3 7,000 to his wife. Father 
and son had come together again in the last 
few months, to Ruskin's infinite happiness. The 
first use he made of his fortune was to hand 
over some ^17,000 to relatives to whom the 
arrangements of the will had caused disappoint- 
ment, and to spend nearly as much in setting 
up a relative in trade, who promptly lost the 
whole sum. The money melted away like snow 
in his hands ; he devoted himself to his mother 



102 RUSKIN 

and tried to fill the gap : he was always the 
tenderest and most dutiful of sons. 

The epitaph he inscribed over his father's grave 
in the churchyard of Shirley, near Croydon, is 
so beautiful and so characteristic that I may here 
quote it — 

" Here rests from day's well sustained burden 
John James Ruskin, born in Edinburgh May loth, 
1785. He died in his house in London, March 
3rd, 1864. He was an entirely honest merchant, 
and his memory is to all who keep it dear and 
helpful. His son, whom he loved to the utter- 
most, and taught to speak truth, says this of 
him." 

Yet at the same time he had been enjoying a 
happy and compensating experience. The head- 
mistress of a big girls' boarding-school at Winning- 
ton in Cheshire had taken some pupils to hear him 
lecture in Manchester, and persuaded him to pay 
the school a visit. It was a great old-fashioned 
country house, in a park of fine trees sloping 
down to a river. The idea was to make the 
whole thing as homelike as possible. Ruskin 
was always fond of girlhood, though there is 
no evidence that he took the slightest interest 
in boyhood. He had never been at school 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 103 

himself, and little boys were to him like miniature 
savages, in whom the selfishness, the cruelty, and 
the boisterousness of humanity had not been chas- 
tened or refined by experience. One cannot have 
everything in everybody ; and it is idle to deny a 
certain feminine touch in Ruskin's nature, instinc- 
tive and fostered by seclusion, which made him all 
his life more at ease in the society of women than 
of men. Perhaps he overvalued sympathy and 
demonstrative affection and petting and tender 
ways of life ; sometimes the long-haired maidens 
of Winnington betrayed him into a sort of semi- 
paternal sentimentality. But to sneer at it all, or 
to grudge him the sort of happiness he derived 
from it, is a cheap and coarse cynicism. He 
was a very unhappy man at this time, feeling the 
weight of the world, conscious of failure and 
ineffectiveness. And the children at Winnington 
gave him what he needed, and what only a few 
very wise and tender-hearted men — friends like 
Carlyle, Burne-Jones, Norton, and Acland could 
give him ; like the little maid in Guenevere, these 
merry and wholesome-minded girls " pleased him 
with a babbling heedlessness that often lured 
him from himself." He devised games and 
dances for them ; he told them stories, taught 



104 RUSKIN 

them drawing : for ten years he was a constant 
visitor. He wrote a little book for them, Ethics 
of the Dustf a set of conversational lectures on 
Crystals ; but the girls to whom the book was 
playfully dedicated did not wholly appreciate it. 
They recognised their own portraits, drawn with 
a gentle perception of their little failings ; but 
nearly twenty years after, the book, which had 
wholly hung fire, bounded into popularity, and 
it was seen that in education, as in many other 
things, Ruskin had been a few steps in advance 
of his time. 

In 1866 he had more melancholy experiences. 
His great friend Lady Trevelyan was ordered 
abroad, and Ruskin took his cousin Joanna with 
him to join her. The day that he started, he 
called at Carlyle's house at Cheyne Walk, to leave 
a few flowers as a parting gift with Mrs. Carlyle, 
that wonderfully gifted, sharp-tongued, courageous, 
devoted woman, whose life had been so full of 
strange suffering, and who won such intense 
affection from her friends. He was told at the 
door that Mrs. Carlyle had died suddenly in her 
carriage that afternoon, from the shock of trying 
to save her dog from being run over. Carlyle 
was away in Scotland, delivering a Rectorial 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 105 

address at Edinburgh. Ruskin wrote to Carlyle, 
and received in reply from the old man, writing 
in the depth of his remorseful agony of spirit, 
one of the noblest letters I know in literature. 

" Your kind words were welcome to me ; thanks. 
I did not doubt your sympathy in what has come ; 
but it is better that I see it laid before me. You 
are yourself very unhappy, as I too well discern — 
heavy-laden, obstructed and dispirited ; but you 
have a great work still ahead, and will gradually 
have to gird yourself up against the heat of the day, 
which is coming on for you, as the Night too 
is coming. Think valiantly of these things. . . . 

"... my life all laid in ruins, and the one 
light of it as if gone out. , . . Come and see me 
when you get home ; come oftener and see me, 
and speak more frankly to me, (for I am very true 
to your highest interests and you) while I still 
remain here. You can do nothing for me in 
Italy ; except come home improved." \i.e. in 
health.] 

But before the letter reached Ruskin, Lady 
Trevelyan was dead, after a few days' illness at 
Neuchatel. He threw himself into the sad task 
of trying to comfort and sustain the rest of the 
party, and wrote to a friend in England : — 

"I've had a rather bad time of it at Neuchatel ; 
what with death and the north wind ; both devil's 



io6 RUSKIN 

inventions as far as I can make out. But things 
are looking a little better now, and I had a lovely 
three hours' walk by the lake shore, in cloudless 
calm, from five to eight this morning, under 
hawthorn and chestnut — here just in full blossom 
— and among other pleasantnesses — too good 
for mortals, as the North Wind and the rest of it 
are too bad. We don't deserve either such bless- 
ing or such cursing, it seems to poor moth me." 

And now he flung himself again into schemes 
for social reform. There was a working man of 
Sunderland, a cork-cutter called Thomas Dixon, 
who wrote to Ruskin, raising several practical 
points. Ruskin replied in a series of twenty-five 
letters, in which he constructed a kind of Utopia, 
an ideal commonwealth on mediaeval and feudal 
lines. He designed a system of trade guilds, 
a state church, a theory of government. It is 
semi-socialistic and semi-individualistic — indeed it 
is hard to classify ; but the point is that out- 
ward liberty can only be based on inward law. 

The book was mercilessly derided, and it is im- 
possible not to feel that he almost courted derision 
by elaborating fantastic details. The same thing 
vitiated his work later on. The prophet must in- 
dicate laws rather than lay down ordinances ; and 
there was plenty of people who could not under- 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 107 

stand the nobility of the book, who were quite 
able to laugh at the idea of young unmarried 
people being examined in moral culture, and 
receiving a degree or diploma — they were to be 
called respectively bachelors and rosieres — before 
they could obtain a licence to marry. Ruskin 
never quite understood that humanity must settle 
its own details, and will not make a clean sweep 
of accustomed traditions. But Time and Tide, 
by Wear and Tyne, as the book is beautifully 
called, has a real value, for all its pretty ab- 
surdities, and must be studied by all who wish 
to discern the progress of Ruskin's mind. 

In these distracted years he wandered much 
about England, lost himself a little in the study 
of Mineralogy, invented a new theory of moun- 
tain cleavage, experimenting with custard and 
dough. It is a desultory record. No doubt 
his health had much to do with his feverish 
and fitful interests ; and he had a private sorrow 
deep in his heart ; but through it all one dis- 
cerns what I have before spoken of, and what, 
if one overlooks, one misses the real significance 
of Ruskin's life — the intense preoccupation with 
the idea of helping and improving the life of 
humanity. Mental depression is often a phy- 



io8 RUSKIN 

sical thing and an unreal thing ; but it does 
one thing — it brings out what is deepest in a 
man, though it exaggerates and darkens the pic- 
ture. Such sorrows show what a man really 
cares about at the bottom of his heart ; and 
though one may say that Ruskin took a dis- 
torted and pessimistic view of life and its issues, 
yet grief revealed his true hopes and fears. An 
idler and a shallower man would have drifted 
into hypochondria and invalidism. Ruskin tor- 
mented himself into something hke insanity 
over the unintelligible riddle of the world. 

But one need not darken the picture. He was 
a man who could rule himself. And there were 
countless people at this time who wrote to him 
and met him, who found him the truest of friends 
and the most delightful of companions. Men and 
women in trouble and doubt and perplexity wrote 
to him from all over England, and received in 
reply letters full of humour and shrewdness and 
good sense. Hardly a letter ever came from his 
pen which has not some delicious stroke of 
humour, some deep and arresting phrase ; while 
to his companions his very desultoriness had an 
incessant charm. He would pass from subject to 
subject, show pictures or minerals with marvel- 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 109 

lous perception of their motive and quality ; and 
it is strange that one, whose utterances are often 
so dogmatic and even so perverse, should have 
been in private life so courteous and winning, 
so gay and modest. Few people probably sus- 
pected the strain at which he was living, or the 
helpless distress with which in his solitary 
moments he fell into despondency and even fury 
of misery over the wrongs and sufferings of the 
world. And all the time he was lecturing, sketch- 
ing, revising, writing, with an industry that burnt 
like a steady flame. He went to Venice in order 
to correct his Stones of Venice; here he had a 
great joy, the discovery of Carpaccio's pictures ; 
and for a little while he seemed to recover the 
joy of his youth. He was enraptured by the 
frescoes of the life of St. Ursula ; and the study 
of her legend played so curious a part in his 
after life that I must say a few words about it. 
He may almost have been said to have fallen 
in love with St. Ursula, with a spiritual passion 
such as Dante's. She became a living ideal, a 
sort of patron saint to him. Her patience and 
her sweetness became to him a pattern and an 
example ; and the thought of her, as one of 
his old friends wrote, " led him — not always, 



m 



no RUSKIN 



but far more than his correspondents knew — to 
burn the letters of sharp retort upon stupidity 
and impertinence, and to force the wearied brain 
and overstrung nerves into patience and a kindly 
answer." 

There followed a time of quiet work at home ; 
there was much business to be done. His cousin 
Joanna Agnew, now Mrs. Severn, was installed at 
Heme Hill. This had a very beneficial result 
upon Ruskin's health and state of mind. The 
business drew off his thoughts from the prob- 
lems of life and from his own sense of failure, 
in the direction of hard mechanical tangible work. 
His cousin — I may venture to say this, because it 
is an open secret to her innumerable friends — was 
the most perfect sisterly influence that had ever 
come into his life. She was, and is, one of the 
most tender-hearted, sympathetic, and blithe of 
beings. She had great practical energy, complete 
unselfishness, and abounding cheerfulness ; and she 
threw the whole of her large-hearted nature into 
the congenial and instinctive task of making her 
immediate circle happy. Indeed, her companion- 
ship was one of the supreme blessings of Ruskin's 
life — she shone like the sun upon his mournful 
temperament. And then too a bereavement has a 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY in 

wonderful way of evoking love. People often 
learn, in the shadow of a great loss, how little all 
the restless aims of humanity really count, when 
compared with the nurture and tendance of devoted 
affection. They sorrow over old coldnesses and 
past instances of selfishness and hardness. They 
try to do better, to be more tender, more self- 
effacing. Ruskin himself, with all his wistful 
longings for human sympathy, was a lonely man ; 
and his harsh old mother, for all her grimness and 
censoriousness, had a spring of exquisite devotion in 
her heart. The two tried hard, in this dark time, 
to be more to each other, and built up a new bond, 
rooted in sorrow, which never afterwards wholly 
failed them. 

His mother was now nearly ninety years of age, 
almost blind, but in full vigour of mind, and 
ruling her household and her son with inexorable 
kindness. She had quite a retinue of aged and 
inefficient servants, none of whom were ever sent 
away, and for whom duties proportioned to blind- 
ness and decrepitude had to be invented. Grim 
she was, but she loved her son " like an old fierce 
lioness," and though she snubbed him unmerci- 
fully herself and ordered him about, she would 
allow no one else to disparage him. She died in 



112 RUSKIN 

the last month of the year 187 1, saying that 
she did not hope to be so high in heaven as to be 
with her husband, but perhaps near enough to 
see him. And Ruskin was left with a surprising 
sense of loneliness. " Here, beside my father's 
body," he wrote on her tomb, " I have laid my 
mother's : nor was dearer earth ever returned 
to earth, nor purer life recorded in heaven." 
He wrote, long years after, to a great friend : — 

" There is no human sorrow like it. The 
father's loss, however loved he may have been, 
yet can be in great part replaced by friendship 
with old and noble friends. The mother's is a 
desolation which I could not have conceived, till 
I felt it. When I lost my mistress, the girl for 
whom I wrote Sesame and Lilies, I had no more 
— nor have ever had since, nor shall have — any 
joy in exertion : but the loss of my mother took 
from me the power of Rest." 

4 

And Carlyle too opened his heart wide to the 
friend who was set on speaking wholesome truth 
to the world, and who had been so sternly 
rebuffed. We can hear the echoes of Carlyle's 
talks and Carlyle's ideas — the " heroic, aristocratic 
stoic ideals," as they have been finely called — 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 113 

in Ruskin's work. Carlyle was much interested 
then in the question of pubhc Hbraries, and 
gave Ruskin's mind an impulse in this direction. 
The result was a book — three lectures — which 
is perhaps the most popular of all Ruskin's writ- 
ings, and also one of the best and most memorable 
of his utterances — the little volume known whim- 
sically enough as Sesame and Lilies. No one has 
ever rightly fathomed the meaning of the title. 
Sesame is, I believe, a kind of oily seed or grain 
that used to be made into biscuits — it has nothing 
here to do with the charm " Open Sesame " in the 
story in the Arabian Nig/ils, at which all doors 
flew open ; and there is a quotation from Isaiah, 
which Ruskin makes, about lilies blooming in 
the desert. I suppose the things symbolised are 
solid nurture and pure loveliness. 

The first lecture, 0/ Kings TreasurieSy under 
cover of being a plea for solid reading, is really 
a denunciation of mere reading, and particularly 
of purposeless reading. Ruskin makes a kind of 
Index Expurgatorius ; and as he bans and excludes 
all theologians, except Jeremy Taylor, and the work 
of all non-Christian moralists, except the Morte 
d'Arthur, Sophocles, and Euripides, all modern 
historians, all philosophers, all Thackeray, George 



114 RUSKIN 

Eliot, Kingsley, Swift, Hume, Macaulay, and 
Emerson, to mention just a few of his bugbears, 
the result is not a very wide range of reading. 
But here, as so often in Ruskin, the book is only a 
statement of passionate personal preferences ; and 
as Ruskin, side by side with impassioned blessing, 
could never refrain from copious cursing, the 
verdict need not be taken as final. His main 
thesis was, that as life was short and leisure scanty, 
no time should be wasted in reading worthless 
books. 

He begins by laying down a principle about 
the effects of reading. He says that the ordinary 
reader, on laying down a book, is apt to say, " How 
good that is — that's exactly what I think." The 
right feeling, Ruskin says, is rather, " How strange 
that is ! I never thought of that before, and yet 
I see that it is true, or if I do not, I hope I shall 
some day ; " and he adds the advice, " Be sure 
that you go to the author to get at his meaning, 
not to find yours." 

From this principle I humbly and heartily 
dissent. My own belief is rather that no human 
being is ever taught anything unless he knows 
it already ; that one goes to books to recognise 
and not to learn ; that the best and most inspiring 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 115 

authors are not those who tell you what they be- 
heve, but who show the reader what he beheves ; 
and that the writers who really move an age are 
those who express clearly and forcibly what most 
people are feeling lamely and obscurely, while the 
authors who fail to get a hearing — I am speaking 
of course of men of proved and unquestioned 
power — are those who are either behind the age 
or in advance of it. That is only my own opinion, 
and one is quite at liberty to believe Ruskin ! 

Then there is a curious passage about the in- 
tent study of words. And this again is vitiated by 
prejudice. Ruskin regretted the introduction into 
English of Greek and Latin words, and viewed 
their intrusion as he might view a torrent of mud 
poured into a crystal pool — '' our mongrel tongue " 
he calls it. And this declaration I must not only 
combat, I must firmly and seriously deny it. The 
extraordinary richness and elasticity of English, 
our incomparable language, is entirely due to 
the fact that we have had no fastidious delicacy 
or pedantic severity about taking words for our 
use. If we want a word, we find one ; if a 
word gets limited to a nuance, we take another 
word for another shade of meaning. Language 
was made for man, not man for language. We 



ii6 RUSKIN 

do not always choose euphoniously, or with due 
regard for the seemly sight and sound of words ; 
and we have too a rather illiterate admiration 
for polysyllabic vocables. But I have no patience 
whatever with purists who would arrest the de- 
velopment of a language. In language, I am all 
for free trade rather than for protection. Ruskin's 
own writing, pure and melodious as it is, is a 
perpetual contradiction to his own principles. Of 
course there is an exquisite beauty in sweet old 
large homely words ; but as thought becomes 
finer and more subtle, language must grow more 
elastic. And I must beg of you not to be misled 
in this matter by the pedants whose economy 
of language corresponds to leanness of thought. 

The second lecture is On Queen's Gardens. It is 
addressed to the women of the leisured classes, and 
Ruskin draws out his ideal of pure womanhood 
as the counterpart of knightly chivalry. He 
shows what the heroic temper of womanhood 
ought to be, and how it may be achieved. "The 
fashion of the time," he says, " renders whatever is 
forward, coarse, or senseless, in feminine nature, 
palpable to all men." The girl is to be trained 
in accurate thought ; not to be brought up in 
a prudish and unreal mystery, but to learn the 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 117 

loveliness, and the inevitableness too, of natural 
laws. She is " to follow," he says, " at least some 
one path of scientific attainment as far as to the 
threshold of that bitter Valley of Humiliation, 
into which only the wisest and bravest of men 
can descend, owning themselves for ever children, 
gathering pebbles on a boundless shore." 

Then he turns to the girl herself. He shows 
that men are bound by law and circumstance, 
but that " against the sins of womanhood there 
is no legislation, against her destructiveness no 
national protest, no public opinion against her 
cruelty." He implores her to learn not to be 
idle, but to cultivate her natural compassion with 
all her might, and to use it daily and hourly to 
heal the pain of the world. 

Here Ruskin is at his very noblest and highest, 
on sure and incontestable ground. And the visible 
pulse and thrill of his thought gains a poignant 
intensity from the fact that he had one particular 
girl in view, of whom I must speak later, the 
love of whom was the deepest passion of Ruskin's 
life, and her rejection of his love the deepest 
sorrow that ever devastated his days. And then 
to these two lectures he added a third, "The 
Mystery of Life and its Arts," which every one 



ii8 RUSKIN 

must read who desires to spell the secret of 
Ruskin's hope and the secret of his despair. It 
contains some of the most intimate confidences 
he ever published. He here shows himself aghast 
at the differences of so many men to the purpose 
and the effect of life. He sees the steps of history 
thronged with great figures, the poet, the priest, 
and the artist, bringing down, like Moses from 
the Mount the very writing of God ; and in the 
face of this, mankind hurries heedlessly and help- 
lessly on its way, raking in the dirt and straws 
of the street, with the heavenly crown hanging 
within reach of the oblivious hand. His own 
failure stares him in the face. 

" I have had," he writes, " what, in many 
respects, I boldly call the misfortune, to set my 
words somewhat prettily together ; not without a 
foolish vanity in the poor knack I had of doing so ; 
until I was heavily punished for this pride, by 
finding that many people thought of the words 
only and cared nothing for the meaning." 

He had given, he says, ten of his best years to 
proclaiming the merits of Turner, and to sorting 
and making available for public contemplation, 
Turner's work. All this had been regarded with 
entire indifference. 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 119 

" I spent," he writes, " the ten strongest years 
of my Hfe (from twenty to thirty) in endeavouring 
to show the excellence of the work of the man 
whom I believed, and rightly believed, to be the 
greatest painter of the schools of England since 
Reynolds. I had then perfect faith in the power 
of every great truth or beauty to prevail ultimately. 
. . . Fortunately or unfortunately, an opportunity 
of perfect trial undeceived me at once and for 
ever." 

He found that the public entirely neglected the 
drawings ; a few people dawdled in to glance at 
them, but that was all. His years of work had all 
been lost. 

" For that I did not so much care ; I had, at 
least, learned my own business thoroughly. . . . 
But what I did care for was the — to me frightful — 
discovery, that the most splendid genius in the 
arts might be permitted by Providence to labour 
and perish uselessly, . . . that the glory of it was 
perishable as well as invisible. . . . That was the 
first mystery of life to me." 

Of course we are all at liberty to think, and if 
we think, to say, that this is all very unreal and 
fantastic and emotional and unbalanced. What an 
outcry about a parcel of drawings, scratches of 
ink and blobs of colour 1 No one can object to 



120 RUSKIN 

the Englishman who prides himself on his common- 
sense and his sturdy welfare calhng it all moon- 
shine and nonsense. But not by commonsense 
and sturdy welfare does the world make progress. 
There were plenty of good-humoured Sadducees 
who doubtless felt even so about the Sermon on 
the Mount. It is better to be on the side of the 
heroes and of the saints ; and even if we cannot 
feel with them or see into their meaning, we can 
at least abstain from stoning them and decrying 
them. I do not myself see a hundredth part of 
what Ruskin saw in Turner. I think many of his 
paintings grotesque and impossible. But still I 
have no doubt that the victory is rather with those 
who see and believe and feel ; and I admire with 
all my heart this awful power, which prophets 
have, of raging helplessly against the hard facts of 
life, of knocking themselves blind and senseless 
against the stupidities and brutalities of human 
nature. I can at least regret my own indifference, 
and recognise it to be an ugly, complacent, short- 
sighted thing. I need not hold it up like a shield 
against the darts of God, or make it into an image 
for my delight and worship ; and there is some- 
thing to me not only horribly pathetic in the sight 
of Ruskin's tears and cries, but something infinitely 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 121 

uplifting and inspiring in the contemplation of 
them. I come idly to see the fantastic struggles 
of some demented person ; and I discover that 
they are the irrepressible agonies of a martyr in 
the flame. 



LECTURE IV 

I 

In the summer of 1869 Ruskin was working 
his hardest in Italy, as I have said. His mother 
was very anxious about him, and implored him 
to come out of the heat and take a rest ; but 
he lingered on. On the 14th of August, at 
Verona, he was packing up to go home, having 
finished his last sketch, when he received a 
telegram announcing that he had been elected 
to the Slade Professorship of Fine Art at Oxford. 
" Which will give me," he wrote to his mother, 
" as much power as I can well use: — and would 
have given pleasure to my poor father — and 
therefore to me — once." 

It gave him, no doubt, more pleasure than 
he knew. It was not a question of gratified 
ambition. He was quite indifferent to money 
and station ; but it was a sign that there were 
men of weight and sense who believed in him 
and his work ; it gave him an accredited position, 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 123 

and opened a door to him. He would be able 
to affect, by direct teaching and personal contact, 
the minds of the rising generation, at their most 
generous and enthusiastic stage ; and Oxford too 
was very dear to him ; he had fallen, as all Oxford 
men do — more I think than Cambridge men — 
under the incomparable and indefinable charm 
of that home of lost causes and mediaeval dreams. 
Not that this is all that Oxford stands for ; but 
it has the particular touch of idealism about it, 
such as surrounds the dethroned monarch and 
the exiled claimant, pursuing with Quixotic 
devotion some unrealisable vision. To what 
extent Ruskin meant to lecture upon Art cannot 
be stated. He had for some years been writing 
about half-a-dozen lectures a year, which filled 
an annual volume. Now only twelve annual 
lectures were required of him. But he planned, 
as he always did, a gigantic scheme of art- 
teaching, which he could not have carried out 
if he had lectured daily for a dozen years. He 
proposed to revise the whole of his theory of 
art, and to write lectures which should begin 
with first principles and ramify into every 
technical branch of art, to conclude with an en- 
cyclopaedic history of art in general. But he 



124 RUSKIN 

did not intend to drop any of his other schemes. 
The result was that his work finally and com- 
pletely broke down both his health and his 
mental powers. It must be remembered that 
he was now a man of fifty, conscious of failure, 
wrestling with intense irritation at the general 
drift of human society. He had six months 
before his work began. Strained and overworked 
as he was, he set to. Corpus Christi College made 
him an Honorary Fellow, and gave him a set of 
rooms; and on 8th February 1870 he appeared in 
his lecture room to deliver his inaugural address. 

The most extraordinary scene followed. It 
must be remembered that he was in many 
ways the man of the hour. Every one knew his 
brilliant and suggestive books, and his schemes — 
wild as they were thought — of social reform. 
His extraordinary charm of personality, which 
soaked into all his writings and gave his readers 
a sense of intimate and individual contact with 
a man of genius ; his wealth, and the use he had 
made of it ; his amazing vehemence of speech, 
his reckless daring of thought, had all created a 
curiosity about him of which he was hardly con- 
scious. The place was packed an hour before ; 
the ante-rooms and passages were blocked ; there 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 125 

was a vociferous and disappointed crowd in the 
street. 

After a hurried conference, a friend pushed 
his way to the desk, and announced that the 
meeting would adjourn to the Sheldonian Theatre. 
The great man, slim and bent, with his piercing 
blue eyes, under shaggy eyebrows, his long brown 
hair, his thin whiskers, his grim mouth, stepped 
to the rostrum. His dress was even then old- 
fashioned. A stiff blue frock-coat with a light 
waistcoat and trousers — long loose linen cuffs ; 
high collars of the Gladstone type ; a bright blue 
stock tie, like an early Victorian statesman. A 
silk gown which he briskly discarded, to leave 
him free to gesticulate, and the velvet cap of a 
gentleman-commoner. Such was the figure that 
came forward. He had few gifts of formal de- 
livery. He began by reading a very elaborate 
passage in a very artificial cadence. Then he 
would break off, and begin to interpolate and ex- 
temporise with immense vivacity and free gestures. 
Sometimes he was dramatic in action. In his 
lecture on birds, he strode about like a rook, 
he swooped like a swallow. But grotesque as 
the performance easily might have been, it carried 
every one away by its eagerness and sincerity. 



126 RUSKIN 

And his glance was of the magnetic and arrest- 
ing sort. Some of his hearers confessed to the 
indescribable sensation, like the kindling of the 
soul, which fell on them if his eyes seemed for 
a moment to dwell upon them. 

Whatever Ruskin felt, it was clear to him from 
that moment that at Oxford, at all events, he 
could get a hearing, and he hurled himself into 
his work with intense enthusiasm. He started a 
drawing school and endowed it. He showered 
down gifts on the place, pictures, casts, en- 
gravings. He gave endless parties and receptions. 
He even enlisted a party of undergraduates to 
help in an experiment of road-making up at 
Hinksey, The road was made, and was infa- 
mously inadequate for all purposes of loco- 
motion. And so the first years sped busily 
away. 

In letters written in 1871 and 1872 to his 
friend Norton, he describes his lecture work : — 

'< I am always unhappy, and see no good in 
saying so. But I am settling to my work here, — 
recklessly, — to do my best with it, feeling quite 
that it is talking at hazard, for what chance good 
may come. But I attend regularly in the schools 
as mere drawing-master, and the men begin to 
come one by one — about fifteen or twenty 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 127 

already ; — several worth having as pupils in any 
way, being of temper to make good growth of." 

And again : — 

" I am, as usual, unusually busy. When I 
get fairly into my lecture work at Oxford, I 
always find that the lecture would come better 
some other way, just before it is given, and so 
work hand to mouth." 

Perhaps I may mention here a remarkable 
satire which was written at the end of the seventies 
by a young Oxford man who had just taken his 
degree, who has since become famous in literature, 
—Mr. W. H. Mallock. 

The book is an account of a party of people 
who meet for a week-end visit at a country house, 
and discuss all sorts of problems in life and art. 
Some of the most famous men of the day, such as 
Huxley, Matthew Arnold, Jowett, and Pater are here 
depicted with inimitable ingenuity and wit. Many 
of Mr, Mallock's happiest effects in the book are 
produced by introducing actual words or senti- 
ments of these great men in a grotesque context 
and with absurd applications. Many of them 
were probably hardly known to the author at 
all ; but Mr. Mallock had known and observed 
Ruskin at Oxford ; and Mr. Herbert, under which 



128 RUSKIN 

name Ruskin appears, is undoubtedly the hero 
of the book. Portentous as the paradoxes put 
in his mouth are, extravagant as the emotions 
are which he is made to express, though the 
sentiment is fantastic and hyperboHcal, yet one 
feels that he is somehow pursued through the 
book by the emotions of the author, and that 
he alone is allowed to appear sincere and im- 
pressive. I would recommend any one who is 
interested in the striking figures of the time and 
their relation to each other's thought, to read 
the book carefully. One can often complete the 
picture of a man by a contemporary caricature 
in a way in which one cannot complete it by sub- 
sequent panegyrics, however reverential. 

2 

I must now return to other memorable enter- 
prises which all date from these years of Oxford 
activity. It was now that Ruskin began to issue 
what is the most heterogeneous and yet charac- 
teristic book that ever came from his pen, Fors 
Clavigera. I hardly dare to recommend it to you ; 
and yet any one who desires to see the innermost 
side of Ruskin's heart and mind, must make up 
his mind to wade through the great volumes. 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 129 

Let me attempt to describe the indescribable. 
Fo7's Clavigera was a series of letters addressed 
to the workers of England, issued in monthly 
parts. It ran at last into eight volumes. The 
title is what is called in Alice in Wonderland a port- 
manteau-word, crammed with symbolism. Fors 
stood at once for destiny and courage ; Clavigera 
means either club-bearing, or nail-bearing, or key- 
bearing. The Club was a symbol of action, the 
Nail of fate, and the Key was the key of heavenly 
mystery. All this must be borne in mind. If 
one asks what it was about, I can only reply 
in the words of Aristophanes : irefi crov, irepi e/uou, 
irep] d-n-avTwv Trpayjudrooi', — about you, about me, 
about everything in the world ; but the general 
motive of the book is the redressing of social 
misery and collective poverty. 

" For my own part," he says in the first letter, 
" I will put up with this state of things, passively, 
not an hour longer. I am not an unselfish 
person, nor an Evangelical one ; I have no 
particular pleasure in doing good ; neither do I 
dislike doing it so much as to expect to be 
rewarded for it in another world. But I simply 
cannot paint, nor read, nor look at minerals, nor 
do anything else that I like, . . . because of the 
misery that I know of, and see signs of, where 

I 



130 RUSKIN 

I know it not, which no imagination can interpret 
too bitterly." 

He preached a communism of wealth and joy, 
and took up his parable against luxury and sel- 
fishness, idle accumulation and tyrannical oppres- 
sion. The tide of eloquence goes rolling on, 
like a fiery flow of lava, full of endless digressions 
into autobiography and art, into poetry and 
legend and romance ; now telling the life-story 
of a hero like Walter Scott, now drifting into 
mysticism, now designing a new coinage, passing 
from a plan for sub-alpine reservoirs to a descrip- 
tion of Carpaccio's Sleeping Princess. Sometimes 
there is a long extract from Marmontel or 
Addison's Spectator; and it is all full of that 
melancholy humour, that caressing fondness, 
that moving pathos, that intense sadness that 
made Ruskin the delight of the world, and yet 
drove him raging into the wilderness. One may be 
bored by Fors, one may lose one's way in it, one 
may fall into hopeless irritation at the childish 
waywardness, the unpractical inconsequence of 
the book. But there is no book quite like it in the 
world, because it is looking straight down into the 
very current of a great and, alas, disordered mind. 

Few men can ever have thought so rapidly, 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 131 

so intensely, with such momentary concentration 
and yet with such wild diffuseness as Ruskin ; 
and fewer still have the power of translating the 
vague dreams and reveries of thought into such 
absolutely limpid and beautiful words. So that 
it is like standing by a clear mountain stream, 
and seeing, through its swift ripples and amber 
curves, the very pebbles over which it flows and 
the ribbons of trailing water-weed, all transfigured 
and glorified by the magical enchantment of art. 

And then too, as Fors went on, Ruskin took 
to printing in it some of the letters he received, 
both of sympathisers and opponents. He was 
strangely candid about the latter, and included 
letters of the most personal and even abusive 
kind ; but as he often also printed his own 
replies, and as he was a master of the art of 
humorous invective, the impression given was as 
a rule favourable to himself. Here is a good 
instance. An impertinent critic wrote to him, 
and in the course of the letter said : — 

" Since you disparage so much iron and its 
manufacture, may it be asked how your books are 
printed, and how is their paper made ? Probably 
you are aware that both printing and paper- 
making machines are made of that material." 



132 RUSKIN 

Ruskin replied : — 

'< Sir, — I am indeed aware that printing and 
paper-making machines are made of iron. I am 
aware also, which you perhaps are not, that 
ploughshares and knives and forks are. And I 
am aware, which you certainly are not, that I am 
writing with an iron pen. And you will find in 
Fors Clavigera, and in all my other writings, 
which you may have done me the honour to read, 
that my statement is that things which have to do 
the work of iron should be made of iron, and 
things which have to do the work of wood should 
be made of wood ; but that (for instance) hearts 
should not be made of iron, nor heads of wood — 
and this last statement you may wisely consider 
when next it enters into yours to ask questions." 

Fors Clavigera is very rich in incidental judg- 
ments and characterisations ; indeed it is this that 
gives it its chief value. The matter of it is so 
discursive, that at times it is only rescued from 
tediousness by its extreme intensity of thought 
and its purity of utterance. One may wish that 
Ruskin could have applied himself more coherently 
to definite points, but upon reflection one is glad 
to leave the method entirely in his own hands. 
In the first place, when he treated a subject 
allegorically, he was accustomed to subdivide his 
material under very elaborate headings. I think 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 133 

that this was one of the things that recommended 
his earlier writings to the stoHd British mind. 
The British mind cares much less about ideas 
than about the arrangement of ideas. It has a 
pathetic belief in the value of correct information, 
and it will attempt to assimilate an idea which is 
communicated in the guise of headings and sub- 
divisions, because it believes that the subject is 
being treated seriously, and that it is somehow 
or other getting cash value for its money. It is 
more concerned for instance to know that the 
gifts of the spirit are sevenfold, and that there are 
seven deadly sins, than to realise the nature of sin 
and of grace. But Ruskin's headings are very 
misleading. They not only do not cover the 
whole ground, but they trespass on each other's 
ground. There are plenty of cases where Ruskin 
will divide a subject into heads, and not only will 
he omit obvious subdivisions, but four or five of his 
headings will prove to be almost identical. It is 
an ironical proof of the turn of the Anglo-Saxon 
reader for the book-keeping theory of literature, 
that it accepted Ruskin's art-teaching, much of 
which was fantastic and inaccurate, because it 
was conveyed under the form of subdivisions. 
Whereas when he became painfully and feverishly 



134 RUSKIN 

in earnest, and wrote as he felt, the public be- 
came unable to follow his argument, and thought 
it vague and disjointed. 

Moreover, it seems to me that Ruskin's effect on 
the world was the effect of a personality and not 
the effect of a reasoned philosophy ; and there is 
no doubt that one gets far nearer to the mind of 
Ruskin and to his ideas in Fors than one ever does 
in Modern Painters. Much of Modern Painters 
consists of brilliant attractive thoughts, born of 
the intellect rather than of the heart, which came 
lightly and fancifull}'^, and were swiftly and grace- 
fully set down. But in Fors it is as though one 
saw some awful spiritual combat proceeding, like 
the wrestling of Jacob by night with the angel on 
Penuel, whose form he could not see and whose 
nature he could not guess, whether he meant to 
test his strength, or to overcome him and leave 
him maimed. And just as the angel, though he 
was an angel of light, made the sinew of the 
halting thigh shrink at his fiery touch, so Ruskin 
too emerged from the conflict a shattered man ; 
and to myself, I will frankly confess, it is just this 
heart-breaking conflict, this appalling struggle 
with mighty thoughts and dreadful fears, that 
made at once the tragedy and the glory of Ruskin's 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 135 

life, because it broke his pride and humbled his 
complacency, and crowned him with the hero's 
crown. For let me say once and for all, that 
under all his irony and humour, under his un- 
balanced vehemence and his no less unbalanced 
sorrow, Ruskin's work, if not severely logical, was 
neither eccentric nor irresponsible. Its soundness, 
its ultimate sanity, was confirmed and not de- 
preciated by subsequent events. 

But in spite of all this it must be frankly 
confessed that Fors is a difficult work to compre- 
hend. Ruskin seems at times to be following no 
definite line of thought ; yet one of the delights of 
it is the great variety of true and beautiful judg- 
ments on all sorts of points connected with art 
and hterature and morality. Let me give a single 
extract, where he is deahng with the moral 
novelists of the nineteenth century, as a speci- 
men of characterisation which is as suggestive and 
as true as it is bold and humorous. 

" Miss Edgeworth," he says, " made her 
morality so impertinent that, since her time, it 
has only been with fear and trembling that any 
good novelist has ventured to show the slightest 
bias in favour of the Ten Commandments. Scott 
made his romance so ridiculous, that, since his 
day, one can't help fancying helmets were always 



136 RUSKIN 

paste-board and horses were always hobby. 
Dickens made everybody laugh, or cry, so that 
they could not go about their business till they 
had got their faces in wrinkles ; and Thackeray 
settled like a meat-fly on whatever one had got 
for dinner, and made one sick of it." 

I don't say that this is a fair or a generous 
or a complete criticism. But it is hideously 
clever, and touches the weaknesses of the mighty 
with a sure hand. Yet by this kind of levity he 
lost friends, who thought that he could not be 
in earnest when he trifled with cherished beliefs ; 
though it is inconceivable that any human being 
can have overlooked the mortal and deadly 
earnestness that runs through the whole ; and if 
Ruskin did lose a few precisians and unimaginative 
persons at the time, he gained and will gain a 
host of admirers and lovers by his gay frankness, 
and the sense of charming vivacity that runs 
through the book. 

3 
Ruskin had, before the date of which I am 
speaking, made one or two attempts to put his 
principles into practical shape. He had been 
left a few small houses in Marylebone by his 
father, and he had put them in charge of a lady- 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 137 

pupil of his, Miss Octavia Hill, whose name has 
since become famous as a philanthropic worker 
on similar lines. His point was that a good 
landlord could, if he abjured high profits, give 
some fixity of tenure, make the houses comfort- 
able, and provide a little ground for recreation. 
It is generally calculated that such property should 
bring in, owing to its insecurity as an invest- 
ment, at least 10 per cent. But Ruskin took 5 
per cent., and spent the margin on improvements. 
At this time he had not developed his later 
heresies about the sinfulness of all usury. I will 
not go into that question, because it is a compli- 
cated one, and because Ruskin — as he often 
did — adopted a principle upon insufficient and 
inadequate grounds. He did not reflect that all 
interest is ultimately due to the multiplying power 
and the stored natural products of the earth, and 
that the basis of all increment is that you can 
dig things like coal out of the earth on the one 
hand, by which the available commodities of the 
earth are increased, and that if you sow a grain 
of wheat, a dozen grains are the result. The 
question is not of course as simple as that ; but 
while it may be contended that all capital and 
all increment alike are the property of the 



138 RUSKIN 

community, and ought not to be appropriated by 
any one individual, that is not the same thing 
as saying that all interest on capital received by 
private persons is wrong. 

Ruskin had a very painful correspondence with 
Miss Octavia Hill at a later date, which is all 
printed in Fors. Some criticisms which she had 
made on his unpractical grasp of business vexed 
him, and he accused her of treachery, and of dis- 
couraging would-be adherents. She amply vindi- 
cated herself ; but the gap was not bridged, 
though he ultimately parted with the whole of 
his small house property to Miss Hill, and ten 
years later frankly admitted his error. He tried 
too the experiment of a small tea and coffee shop, 
with a fantastic care of details, such as the 
painted sign and the old china jars in the window. 
The business paid its expenses and produced a 
fair profit. But it is difficult to say how much 
of this was due to Mr. Ruskin's prestige. Tolstoy, 
the Russian novelist, had a sharp lesson in this 
respect, when he found that a pair of very in- 
different shoes, which he made in order that he 
might earn a wage by manual work, were kept 
under a glass case as curiosities to be shown to 
visitors. And then too Ruskin made an experi- 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 139 

ment about his books. It must be remembered 
that his fortune was melting away like snow in 
a thaw. But he hated bad paper and bad print, 
he could not bear the system of discounts and 
trade commissions, so he withdrew his earlier 
works from circulation, and made it as incon- 
venient as possible for every one concerned to 
get the books, and as difficult as possible for any 
incidental profit to be made out of them. But the 
public has the art of scenting out and getting what 
it wants ; and in spite of his precautions, the 
books were bought — indeed the profits which 
Ruskin received on his books gave him an income, 
when all his fortune was gone, of something like 
^^4000 a year ; so that he was a rich man to 
the end of his days. But it does not by any 
means follow that it was a fair trading arrange- 
ment; indeed, it was only made possible by his 
increasing popularity, and cannot be cited as an 
economic precedent. 

And then at last he made his great experiment. 
He began in 1871 to ask for definite adherents 
to help him in carrying out his ideas in practice. 
His aim was to fight the spirit of commercialism, 
which he believed was at the root of half the pre- 
valent evils. He wanted men and women to join 



140 RUSKIN 

with him in a serious attempt to hve a simple Hfe 
— he never preached or practised asceticism in 
any form — to introduce higher aims and a taste 
for purer pleasures. He thought that the re- 
claiming of waste land might give employment 
and healthy work. He did not believe that 
political agitation would do anything ; but 
thought that if all those who had held the 
same sort of creed as himself and owned the 
same hopes, would come out of their conven- 
tional position in a base and hide-bound society, 
the body thus created would become a force 
which would have to be reckoned with. His 
idea was a Socialistic one, that capital, the means 
and material of labour, should be in the hands of 
Government — that is in a central body to whom 
authority was to be delegated ; and so he founded 
a company or Guild, the Guild of St. George, 
which was to hold property for the benefit of 
its members. Every member was to assent to 
a comprehensive little creed, and to do some 
sort of work for his living ; to obey the authority 
of the officers of the Guild, and to contribute a 
tithe of his income to a central fund. The fund 
was to buy land for the members to cultivate ; 
to have a common store of valuable property ; 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 141 

to prefer manual labour to machinery, to use 
wind and water power for mills and factories, 
not steam ; to give fair wages, to found museums, 
to train refined taste, and to give healthy oppor- 
tunities of recreation. He amused himself with 
all sorts of detailed enactments, pretty absurd 
fancies, which brought discredit on the scheme. 
Thus no wine was to be drunk which was not 
ten years old, a new coinage was to be designed ; 
the members were to wear costumes indicative 
of their rank and occupation, and to wear jewels 
which were to be uncut, except agates. 

Then he selected a comprehensive little library 
to include all that he thought it good for a man to 
read ; such books as the Economicus of Xenophon, 
for a manual of household life, and Gotthelf's 
Ulric the Farmer, from a French version which 
he loved, because his father had been used to 
read it alone to him as a boy. 

He began by giving the Guild a tenth of his 
fortune, which was still a large one. The tithe 
came to ^7000, and in three years the rest of 
the civilised world contributed £2'},6. He took a 
cottage near Sheffield, and stored some fine things 
there, pictures and minerals. The first land held 
by the Guild was a farm of thirteen acres at 



142 RUSKIN 

Abbeydale, near Sheffield, which was bought by 
the Guild and taken over by a knot of enthusiasts, 
who knew nothing of farming, but were earning 
a living in other ways. It was a ludicrous failure. 
They employed a bailiff, who absorbed the profits. 
The land, bought at nearly ;^200 an acre, proved 
worthless : it became a tea-garden, and Ruskin 
was roundly abused for the failure. Beside this, 
the Guild had a cottage at Scarborough, two acres 
of moorland at Barmouth, and a wood in Wor- 
cestershire. One or two local industries were 
started in the Isle of Man and in the Lakes, 
but the whole experiment was a failure, and 
not even a failure of the colossal and tragic 
kind, but a petty and dismal failure, so that 
one hardly knows whether to laugh or cry over 
it all, at its vast designs and beautiful outlines, 
and its very scrappy and grotesque performances. 
We may ask why a man whose genius was 
so great, whose view of the world was so noble, 
whose principles were so just and in many 
ways so sensible, and whose influence was so 
potent, should have had to suffer this ghastly 
fiasco ? Well, in the first place Ruskin mistook 
his powers and his opportunity. A prophet must 
be content to be a prophet. He must not claim 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 143 

a close hold over details — those must grow up 
naturally out of his ideas when they are accepted. 
Many of Raskin's ideas are taking shape and 
working themselves out on practical lines. But 
in addition to his ideas it must be remembered 
that he had in one sense a practical mind, in 
that he loved precision of detail in everything, 
and desired concrete expression of his dreams. 
But he did not fully grasp the principles of 
economics, and he did not understand human 
nature. He was lacking in imaginative sympathy. 
He could not believe that there were plenty of 
robust sensible and virtuous people in the world 
who did not value art at a pin's head, and 
who desired to be comfortable in a common- 
place way. One may wish that human nature 
were different ; one may love great ideas, and 
desire peace and beauty to prevail, and yet grasp 
the fact that all human beings are not built on 
the same lines. All the charming details of 
Ruskin's Utopia were simply an expression of 
his own pure and dainty preferences, and he made 
the mistake of wishing to impose them upon 
others, or rather of believing that people only 
required to be told what was beautiful to desire 
it. It was this intense and stubborn dogmatism, 



144 



RUSKIN 



this sense of Tightness in his own tastes and 
preferences, that was at the root of all his bitter 
failures. By his glowing words and by his 
own pure example he was sowing seed fast. 
But he desired to see an immediate harvest, 
and this the prophet cannot hope for — or if he 
does hope for it, he is destined to horrible dis- 
appointment. To me the details of Ruskin's 
schemes are infinitely charming and pathetic ; 
but I should resent any compulsion in such a 
matter, while the whole situation seems to me 
as unutterably tragic as any situation I know 
in literature or life. This sensitive high-minded 
enthusiastic man, lashing himself into frenzy at 
the sight of the brute forces of human stupidity 
and baseness, in all their awful strength and 
solidity, finding that human beings would neither 
be charmed nor caressed nor laughed nor scolded 
into agreement, is to me one of the most august 
and pathetic figures that it is possible to con- 
ceive — beyond the reach indeed of human imagi- 
nation. One is thrilled and awed and harrowed 
by the tragedies of Shakespeare or the novels 
of Tolstoy. But the whole of Ruskin's works 
and letters are like a gigantic romance, with 
the difference that, instead of being conditioned 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 145 

by the imagination of a novelist, they are a 
volume straight from the awful hand of God, 
where no obstacles are smoothed away by happy 
coincidences, no wrongs conveniently righted, 
but where one can see the fierce conflict of 
elemental forces with a single soul, as noble, 
as perceptive, as subtle, as delicate as any spirit 
which was ever linked to a human frame, fight- 
ing single-handed, in sorrow and despair, against 
all the harsh and strong facts of life — not only 
facts that wreck lives and darken homes, but 
the very facts that seem to make for content- 
ment and delight. It is the dreadful bewilder- 
ment that comes of trying to see where and 
what God really is, and on which side He is 
fighting that makes the tragedy of the situation ; 
and though the surface may be rippled by 
humour and absurdity, yet the scene, if one 
views it fairly, is like the picture drawn by 
Homer of Charybdis — the swiftly running tide, 
the shudder of the moving deeps, till in the 
spin and eddy of the roaring race, the depth 
is laid bare, and the earth herself appears, black 
with sand. 



146 RUSKIN 

4 

And here I will relate in a few words what 
was probably the central fact in Ruskin's life 
— a love that transformed itself from a paternal 
affection into a consuming passion ; a love which 
was for years the mainspring and comfort of 
his life, and the frustration of which not only 
cost him the deepest of all the sorrows he had 
to endure, but caused the strain under which 
his overburdened mind gave way. One must 
not look too closely into an episode like this ; 
but it was to such an extent the pivot of his 
life, it explained so much, it accounted for so 
much, that it must be known and it must be 
indicated. 

It was in 1858 that it began. It was at 
Rheinfelden, in that year, that on a Sunday 
walk he gathered a purple orchis by the road- 
side, and on coming home took pencil in hand 
to sketch it. A trivial incident enough ! But 
it seems to have brought home to him the ugly 
rigidity and absurdity of his Sabbatarian train- 
ing ; and he dated from that incident a train 
of thought which led to his abjuring his old 
EvangeHcal beliefs. A Sunday at Turin a few 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 147 

weeks later, when he attended a Httle Protestant 
chapel of Waldensians, put the finishing touch. 
He heard the grim Puritan doctrines of Calvin- 
ism and Predestinarianism preached with a fierce 
unction, and the horror of it all came suddenly 
home to him. He left the chapel converted 
" inside out," as he said. When he reached 
home a few days later, in a very despondent 
frame of mind, he received a letter from a 
stranger in London, Mrs. La Touche, an Irish- 
woman, a half-sister of Lord Desart, asking if he 
could find time to give her three children a few 
lessons in drawing, and adding that she ventured 
to ask the favour because she believed him to be 
the only sound teacher of art. The frankness of 
the request took his fancy, and he went round 
to call, little thinking what was in store for him. 
This was his description of what happened : 
" Presently the drawing-room door opened and 
Rosie came in, quietly taking stock of me with 
her blue eyes as she walked across the room ; gave 
me her hand as a good dog gives its paw, and 
then stood a little back. * I thought you so 
ugly,' she told me afterwards. She didn't quite 
mean that ; but only that her mother having 
talked much of my ' greatness ' to her, she had 



148 RUSKIN 

expected me to be something like Garibaldi or 
the Elgin Theseus ; and was extremely disap- 
pointed." 

Rose La Touche was undoubtedly a very charm- 
ing and precocious child, extremely beautiful, full 
of lively fancies, with marvellous power of winning 
and returning love, with pretty half-mocking 
half-caressing ways, with a set of pet nicknames 
for the people round her ; just the sort of 
child, with her wayward fancies and her lavish 
affection, to win the heart of a sorrowful and 
lonely man. He wrote, long after ; — " Rose, in 
heart, was with me always, and all I did was for 
her sake." One of those relations grew up which 
are intensely moving to think of, and even to read 
of, but which can hardly bear to be spoken about, 
with all the silly pretty chatters, the little jokes 
and quarrels and reconciliations, that are too 
intimate to record, and yet which may play so 
intense a part in daily life. Some of the letters 
she wrote to him are preserved — indeed he 
carried her first letter to himself about with 
him for years, enclosed in thin plates of gold 
— and some of his letters to her are printed, 
in which one sees with irrepressible emotion 
how this man of middle-age, in the forefront 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 149 

of the writers and workers of the day, poured 
out his heart and mind to tlie girl and depended 
on her sympathy and even her counsel. Such 
things cannot be quoted, but they are intensely 
moving, and to me even more than beautiful. 
She was a child of ten when they first met, 
and when she was eighteen the whole of Ruskin's 
power of devotion was centred upon her. He 
told her of his desire that she should become 
his wife, but she could give him no answer, 
and he agreed to wait till she was twenty-one. 
" Did you see the gleam of sunshine yesterday 
afternoon?" Ruskin wrote to Burne-Jones. "If 
you had only seen her in it, bareheaded, between 
my laurels and my primrose bank ! " But she 
had no desire to change the old relation, and 
moreover, she had become deeply devout on 
the Evangelical lines which he had discarded. 
She published a little religious manual in 1873 
called Clouds and Light, and when he asked her 
for answer, she told him frankly and sweetly 
enough that she could not marry an unbeliever. 

He plunged into work to deaden thought. In 
the autumn of 1874 he heard that she was dying ; 
her precocious intellect and her deep religious 
emotion had burnt the vital spark out. The 



150 RUSKIN 

story used to be that he went off at once to 
her, but that she refused to see him unless he 
could say that he loved God better than herself, 
and this he would not say. But the story is not 
true. He saw her often, and was with her to 
the last. She died in 1875, and his heart was 
buried in her grave. 

This is one of the little allusions he made 
to the end of his hopes, in a letter to some of 
his nearest friends : — 

" I have just heard that my poor little Rose is 
gone where the hawthorn blossoms go — which 
I've been trying to describe all the morning — 
and can't get them to stay with me. ... I have 
been long prepared, so you need not be anxious 
about me. But the tree branches look very black." 

In 1874, before her illness, he wrote to his 
old friend Miss Beever : " I wanted my Rosie 
here. In heaven I mean to go and talk to Pytha- 
goras and Socrates and Valerius Publicola. I 
shan't care a bit for Rosie there, she needn't think 
it. What will grey eyes and red cheeks be good 
for there?" That was it. He saw all round him 
others happy and blest in wedded love, refreshing 
their weary spirits and healing the hurts of combat 
in the quiet peace of home. Heaven seemed to 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 151 

heap upon him the good things for which he did 
not care, and to deny him what he desired and 
needed most. Those who saw him surrounded 
by love and care, honoured and famous, rich 
and using his wealth generously for what was 
nearest to his mind, marvelled that he could still 
carry about with him a spring of secret sorrow 
— which indeed he did not allow to overflow, 
but which yet poisoned all his happiness. Few 
then guessed what it all meant, and how the 
distracted work in which he indulged, the irritable 
restlessness of brain and heart, were but his brave 
attempts to forget. We may lose ourselves in vain 
speculation as to what might have been the issue 
of it all, could he but have gained what he desired, 
or why so bitter a cup was forced to his lips. But 
that is the story, and not only cannot the influence 
of that love, which began so brightly and gaily 
under the tender lights and dews of dawn, and 
which waxed into so hot and broad a noon of 
passion, be overlooked and set aside ; but it must 
rather be regarded as the one central fact of 
Ruskin's inner life : it revealed to him the worth 
and depth of love ; and in its agony of dis- 
appointment, its sharp earthly close, it laid his 
spirit in the dust, and condemned him to a 



152 RUSKIN 

solitude of pain, the secret significance of which 
perhaps came home to him in those hours of 
incommunicable musing, when the music of the 
world was dumb to him, and the light of beauty 
sickened and died on tower and tree. 



LECTURE V 



As life's sands ran out, and Ruskin's old equa- 
nimity of work declined, the range and sweep 
of his plans became more vast and wide. He 
wrote humorously in 1875: — 

" I begin to ask myself, with somewhat pressing 
arithmetic, how much time is likely to be left me, 
at the age of fifty-six, to complete the various 
designs for which, until past fifty, I was merely 
collecting material. Of these materials I have 
now enough by me for a most interesting (in 
my own opinion) history of fifteenth-century 
Florentine Art, in six octavo volumes ; an analysis 
of the Attic art of the fifth century B.C. in three 
volumes ; an exhaustive history of northern thir- 
teenth-century art, in ten volumes ; a life of Sir 
Walter Scott, with analysis of modern epic art, 
in seven volumes ; a life of Xenophon, with 
analysis of the general principles of education, 
in ten volumes ; a commentary on Hesiod, with 
final analysis of the principles of Political Eco- 
nomy, in nine volumes ; and a general description 
of the geology and botany of the Alps, in twenty- 
four volumes." 

«S3 



154 RUSKIN 

He lectured a good deal in this year, and 
studied Botany and Geology. But since the 
Christmas in Venice of which I have spoken, his 
writings took on a new tinge. He read the Bible 
more diligently, and like many men whose opinions 
have widened, felt its inspiration more deeply, as 
his reliance on its literal and verbal accuracy 
declined. At the same time he began to take up 
a distinctly antagonistic attitude to science and 
the conclusions of science. He did not shun 
the closest investigations of nature, but he thought 
that he was bound to protest against the in- 
creasing tendencies to materialism. He became 
in fact a mystic ; his faith slipped from the 
bands of orthodoxy, and became very much 
what Carlyle's faith was, a vague but intense 
Theism, which recognised, as far as one can 
apply human terms to things so remote and 
abstruse, a mind, a purpose, a will at work behind 
nature and man. It is of course the insoluble 
enigma, the realisation of a power presumably 
all-originating and all-powerful, which is yet in 
a condition of combat, and appears to thwart 
its own designs. It is the old question of free- 
will in another shape. There is little logical 
ground for believing in free-will, and yet it is, 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 155 

so far as experience and consciousness goes, the 
one indisputable fact of life. The difficulty of 
course is this. If God is the origin of all pheno- 
mena and all conditions, He must have imposed 
upon Himself limitations, because His law is not 
harmonious, but obstructs itself. The moral sense 
is at variance with the natural instinct. But for 
all that Ruskin's faith was firm, if it was not 
definite, and he put it in the forefront of his 
teaching. He wrote from Oxford : — ■ 

" I gave yesterday the twelfth and last of my 
course of lectures this term, to a room crowded 
by six hundred people, two-thirds members of 
the University, and with its door wedged open 
by those who could not get in ; this interest of 
theirs being granted me, I doubt not, because 
for the first time in Oxford I have been able 
to speak to them boldly of immortal life." 

But it was a time of awful strain. His Rose 
was dying, and he could not pledge his belief even 
to her and to her dying prayers. Yet he opened 
his heart to many new friends. He became greatly 
attached to the Duke of Albany, then at Oxford, 
and went to stay at Windsor Castle with him. He 
visited Mr. Gladstone at Hawarden, and convinced 
himself that he had been wrong in ever doubting 



156 RUSKIN 

his entire sincerity. He cancelled a passage he 
had written in Fors disparaging Mr. Gladstone's 
principles, and inserted a note in the blank space 
to say that the gap was a memorial of rash judg- 
ment. He also formed a close friendship with 
Mr. Gladstone's daughter Mary, now the widowed 
Mrs. Drew. But things were going with him from 
bad to worse. He felt the strain of his work, but 
could not rest. He wrote a touching letter about 
his sense of inadequacy and failure. It seems 
strange that a man who was becoming one of the 
foremost and most influential men in England 
should feel thus ; and no doubt physical causes 
were largely responsible. But all his practical 
enterprises seemed to break down ; and what he 
could neither see nor measure was the steady 
growth of his influence. He wrote : — 

'* My own feeling, now, is that everything 
which has hitherto happened to me, and been 
done by me, whether well or ill, has been fitting 
me to take greater fortune more prudently, and 
to do better work more thoroughly. And just 
when I seem to be coming out of school — very 
sorry to have been such a foolish boy, yet 
having taken a prize or two, expecting now to 
enter upon some more serious business than 
cricket, I am dismissed by the Master I hoped to 
serve, with a — ' That's all I want of you, sir.' " 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 157 

He was working at a catalogue of Turner's 
drawings, and at a number of Fors, little 
guessing that it would be the last he would write 
for seven dreary years ; and he gave a very touch- 
ing account of Turner's last days, and of the sense 
of failure and public indifference which embit- 
tered the great painter's later years. He spoke of 
Turner's youthful picture of Coniston, veiled in 
morning mists ; and went on to tell of Turner's 
last prodigious efforts, and of how his "health, 
and with it in great degree his mind, failed sud- 
denly, with a snap of some vital cord." And 
then he wrote the passage, the most beautiful 
and pathetic which he ever penned : — 

"... Morning breaks, as I write, along those 
Coniston Fells, and the level mists, motionless and 
grey beneath the rose of the moorlands, veil the 
lower woods, and the sleeping village, and the long 
lawns by the lake-shore. 

" Oh that some one had but told me, in my 
youth, when all my heart seemed to be set on 
these colours and clouds, that appear for a little 
while and then vanish away, how little my love of 
them would serve me, when the silence of lawn 
and wood in the dews of morning should be com- 
pleted ; and all my thoughts should be of those 
whom, by neither, I was to meet more ! " 

Then, as suddenly, his friends became aware 



158 RUSKIN 

that in him too the strain and the sorrow of his 

life had broken through the bulwarks, and invaded 

the inmost fortress of life and consciousness. 

His mind lost its balance. It was hoped at first 

that it was but a temporary affection, but it grew 

worse day by day, and after a time of horrible 

suspense to those about him, his sudden and 

dangerous illness was announced. The chief 

feature of his state was a continuous delirium, 

arising from some obscure inflammation of the 

tissues of the brain. Let me quote the beautiful 

and tender words of one of his nearest friends. 

Professor Collingwood, on the subject. 

" Let such troubles of the past be forgotten : 
all that I now remember of many a weary night 
and day is the vision of a great soul in torment, 
and through purgatorial fires the ineffable tender- 
ness of the real man emerging, with his passionate 
appeal to justice and baffled desire for truth. 
To those who could not follow the wanderings of 
the wearied brain it was nothing but a horrible 
or a grotesque nightmare. Some, in those trials, 
learnt as they could not otherwise have learnt 
to know him, and to love him as never before." 

The affliction took him quite unawares. There 

had been definite premonitory symptoms. The 

only thing that might have shown him where he 

was drifting was rapid alternation of intense ex- 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 159 

citement, accompanied by vivid dreams and un- 
natural restlessness, with periods of intense 
depression. And here I will say a few words 
about Ruskin's mental condition for the rest of 
his life. He is often spoken of as having been 
mad. That is not at all the case. He had no 
fixed delusion, no insane preoccupation. 

He wrote, for instance, to Miss Gladstone about 
one of his attacks : — 

" I find it will be quite impossible for me to 
come to Hawarden this autumn. I am very 
utterly sorry, and should only make you sorry for 
me if I were to tell you the half of the weaknesses 
and the worries which compel me to stay at 
home, and forbid all talking. The chief of all 
reasons being, however, that in my present state 
of illness, nearly every word anybody says, if I 
care for them, either grieves or astonishes me 
to a degree which puts me ofi my sleep, and off 
my work, and off my meat. I am obliged to 
work at botany and mineralogy, and to put cotton 
in my ears ; but you know one can't pay visits 
while one's climbing that hill of the voices, even 
if some sweet ones mingle in the murmur of 
them. I'm rather going dowji the hill than up 
just now, it's so slippery ; but I haven't turned — 
only slipped backwards." 

Or again he wrote, at a later date : — 

" If a great illness like that is quite conquered, 



i6o RUSKIN 

the return to the lovely world is well worth 
having left it for the painful time ; one never 
knew what beauty was before (unless in happy 
love w^hich I had about two hours and three- 
quarters of once in my life). I am really better 
now than for some years back, able every day 
for a little work, not fast, but very slow (second 
Praet. isn't out yet, I'm just at work on the 
eleventh chapter), and able to take more pleasure 
in things than lately. 

For a good many years after this first attack 
of derangement and delirium, he had similar 
attacks, but never one so bad. They were gener- 
ally heralded by the same excitement and the 
same depression ; but when they were over, he 
returned rapidly and securely to his ordinary 
health ; and indeed, as Professor Collingwood wrote, 
they passed over him like storm-clouds leaving 
a clear sky. Indeed he was in many ways happier 
and more tranquil in the intervals than he had 
been before. He knew perfectly well what had 
happened to him, that he had been, as it is called, 
out of his mind. But he spoke of it frankly and 
even humorously, and described his insane fancies. 
He never showed any morbidity about it, nor did 
it in any way affect his relation to his own circle 
or to his outside friends. It just came and 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY i6i 

went as other illness might come and pass away. 
He had fallen ill in February. By May he was 
at work again. His friends, anxious to show their 
sympathy and esteem, bought Turner's great pic- 
ture of the Spliigen for looo guineas, and gave it 
him, to his great delight. 

2 

But there was a singular and notorious adven- 
ture just ahead of him. He had taken occasion 
in a number of Fors to dismiss the works of Mr. 
Whistler with a contemptuous paragraph. 

I cannot here go into the main question. 
There can be no doubt that Whistler was in his 
way a very great artist, though a very unequal 
one. Some of his portraits are beyond praise. 
But it may be questioned whether his brilliant 
and impressionist experiments in colour in the 
pictures such as the Nocturnes, and in particular 
the Nocturne in Blue and Silver of old Battersea 
Bridge, which was produced in court, can be 
taken quite seriously. But art is one of those 
things about which it is impossible to argue. 
The pictures are beautiful in the eyes of framed 
critics, and have a mysterious suggestiveness. 
Their permanence cannot be foretold. The point 



i62 RUSKIN 

is that no tribunal can lay down whether a parti- 
cular picture is great and good art, because so 
much depends upon its suggestive effect. One 
might as well have a lawsuit about a lyric of 
Tennyson's. On the other hand, in so far as the 
artist is a tradesman, he may be affected by a 
damaging statement of a critic, and deprived of 
his means of livelihood. 

Ruskin it seems, before his illness, anticipated 
with unconcealed delight the prospect of the trial. 
He wrote or said to Lady Burne-Jones : " It's mere 
nuts and nectar to me, the notion of having to 
answer for myself in court, and the whole thing 
will enable me to assert some principles of art 
economy which I've never got into the public's 
head by writing ; but may get sent all over the 
world vividly in a newspaper report or two." 
The words complained of were these. Ruskin 
had written that pictures ought not to have been 
admitted to the Grosvenor Gallery in which the 
ill-educated conceit of the artist so nearly ap- 
proach the aspect of wilful imposture. " I have 
seen and heard much of cockney impudence 
before now, but never expected to hear a coxcomb 
ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of 
paint in the public's face." Ruskin was too ill 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 163 

to be present at the trial, but Whistler gave his 
evidence with his unparalleled assurance and 
humour. He admitted that he had " knocked 
off " a Nocturne in two days. The Attorney- 
General said, "The labour of two days, then, is 
that for which you ask two hundred guineas ? " 
" No," said Whistler, " I ask it for the knowledge 
of a lifetime." 

Burne-Jones himself gave memorable evidence. 
Bowen asked him if he thought one of the Noc- 
turnes a work of Art. 

Burne-Jones. — " No, I cannot say that it is. 
It is only one of a thousand failures that artists 
have made in their efforts to paint night." 

Bowen. — " Is that picture in your judgment 
worth two hundred guineas ? " 

Burne-Jones. — " No, I cannot say that it is, 
seeing how much careful work men do for much 
less. Mr. Whistler gave infinite promise at first, 
which he has not since justified. I think he has 
evaded the great difficulty of painting, and has not 
tested his powers by carrying it out . . . the 
danger is this, that if unfinished pictures become 
common, we shall arrive at a stage of mere 
manufacture, and the art of the country will 
be degraded." 



i64 RUSKIN 

Of old Battersea Bridge the Judge (Huddleston) 
said, ♦' Are those figures on the top intended for 
people ? " 

Whistler. — " They are just what you like." 
Judge. — " That is a barge beneath ? " 
Whistle}-. — " Yes, I am very much flattered at 
your seeing that." 

The whole trial was merely farcical, and the 
jury gave a verdict in Whistler's favour, with 
damages one farthing. It is hard to see what else 
they could do but enter into the joke. Both 
sides had to pay their own costs, and Ruskin's 
friends subscribed to pay his, which came to ;^385. 
Whistler wrote to his solicitor to suggest that his 
own supporters should do the same, adding, " in 
the event of a subscription, I would willingly con- 
tribute my own mite." They were not subscribed 
for, and Whistler went through the bankruptcy 
court. It is said that he wore the farthing on his 
watch chain till the end of his life. 

It is not a very dignified episode ; and nothing 
can really justify the tone of arrogant and mali- 
cious contempt which Ruskin had used. It was 
a flash of his perverse and irritable dogmatism. 
He had cracked the literary whip so long and so 
loud, and so many whips had been cracked at 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 165 

himself, that he had forgotten how much such 
flourishes might hurt. 

But further than that, one cannot acquit Ruskin 
in the matter of having exhibited an evil and a 
tyrannical temper. He was a man of very great 
distinction, and he held a supreme and unassailed 
position in the world of art. Single-handed he 
had accomplished a great revolution ; he had, like 
Mahomet, broken the old idols of the land, and he 
had established a new set of idols in their place. 
He must have known that his words would carry 
immense weight. If he had made the position 
of the Pre-Raphaelites secure, he ought to have 
reflected that he could do much to unmake the 
position of a single artist. And then the criticism 
was what the French call saugrenu — it was stupid, 
and it was expressed brutally and vindictively, 
considering the artists whom he had ignored and 
the strange medley of painters whom he had 
praised ; considering too that there were great 
tracts of art of which he knew nothing, and that 
his life had been spent in discovering painters of 
unrecognised merit, the whole judgment was 
childish and petulant. At this very time he was 
exalting to the skies Miss Kate Greenaway, an 
artist who had no particular technical distinction, 



i66 RUSKIN 

but only a delightful knack of catching the charm 
of childhood. 

It may be urged in excuse that he was at this 
time more conscious of failure than of success ; 
that he was in a state of exasperated indignation 
against the prejudice and the indifference of the 
world about causes which he had passionately 
at heart. And then too he loathed the cynical 
levity, the touch of the mountebank which there 
undoubtedly was about Whistler. He could not 
believe that any great art could proceed from 
such a spirit. He was bound indeed by his own 
principles to believe and maintain this, though 
he had never taken the trouble to find out that 
those principles were not true. He could not 
see that there might co-exist in a character like 
Whistler's a great seriousness about art and a 
superficial irony about life. He felt with Burne- 
Jones that the point at issue was moral rather 
than artistic, and the facile impressiveness, the 
charming trickery of Whistler's art seemed to 
him wicked, pernicious and degrading. But the 
episode is intensely significant, because it tears 
away the veil of courtesy and humour and 
chivalry, the personal appeal which made Ruskin's 
attitude to human beings so touching and so 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 167 

fascinating, and reveals the dogmatic and self- 
righteous spirit which was the root of all his 
troubles, and which I personally believe was the 
reason why he needed so heavy and persistent a 
chastening. The spirit of dogmatism, of intel- 
lectual and spiritual pride, is, I make no doubt, 
the most deadly and dangerous quality in the 
world. The old allegory of the fall of Satan and 
the rebel angels is a vehicle of the sternest and 
hardest truth, because it shows what is or may be 
the last and deepest fault of the purest and most 
exalted spirit. Ruskin was by nature a very noble 
and guileless character. His intellectual energy 
saved him from all grosser sins ; but he had, and 
it would be idle to conceal it, this one intolerable 
fault, which was hidden from him by the gener- 
osity and fineness of his enthusiasms. He knew 
he was right ; and though this gave much of what 
he said a great intensity and driving force, because 
there are so many natures in the world who are 
more desirous of being commanded than of being 
persuaded, yet when it over-brimmed the cup, it 
foamed itself away in rash and mistaken judg- 
ments, which stained and encumbered his message 
and left him weak and helpless. I look upon 
Ruskin's whole life as the exorcising and casting 



i68 RUSKIN 

out of that demon. If, as I hold, the character, 
the individuality, survives alike the memory and 
the mortal frame and the frailer elements, then one | 
can see the need of this sad process of chastening | 
and correcting ; and not otherwise. No faith can 
have vitality or hope which does not hold that we 
are somehow the better for our failures and our 
falls, however much they may have devastated our 
life and influence, with whatever shame and self- 
reproach they may have wasted our days. 

3 
Few things are more unsatisfactory than de- 
scriptions of places one has not seen. A dozen 
scratches with a pen on a piece of paper would 
give you a better idea of Brantwood than a dozen 
elaborate paragraphs. That is a humiliating fact 
for a writer, and I have often wondered why it is 
that words are so vague and powerless. What 
is worse still, one is generally disappointed in 
the appearance of a place of which one has read 
an elaborate description. I am in hopes that some 
of you may some day take a pious pilgrimage to 
Brantwood, and it is such a beautiful place that 
I am not much afraid that you will be dis- 
appointed. You must imagine a long and rather 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 169 

narrow lake — the lake of Coniston — it looks on 
the map like an elongated sausage — with low hills 
on either side. Suppose yourself going up the 
lake from the rather dreary and undulating 
country that lies between its southern end and 
the sea. About two miles from the upper end 
we will pause. At the head of the water lie the 
steep woods of larch and pine, of Monk Coniston ; 
to the left is a little scattered village of stone or 
white rough-cast houses terraced up the slope. 
Above them rises the great mountain called the 
Old Man, and the ragged long-backed height of 
Wetherlam, — huge green hills, with rolling out- 
lines, and outcrops of rock, their dark hollows 
and quiet folds full, as I have often seen them, 
of a soft golden haze. 

On the right, under a long line of heathery 
fells, their skirts covered with larch-woods and 
oak-copses, about a hundred feet above the lake, 
the big irregular white house of Brantwood poises 
on the slope, with green meadows below it to 
the water's edge, commanding a wide view down 
the lake and across to the Old Man. The house 
lies embosomed in the thickets, among steep - 
hanging close-grown copses, with long stems 
intertwined, and mossy grass under foot, rich 



170 RUSKIN 

in spring with daffodils and hyacinths. There 
are Httle climbing paths everywhere ; many 
dashing streams descend from the moorland in 
pools and water-breaks, among moss-grown stones, 
and the heathery bluffs above are fenced from 
the wood by high stone walls. 

The house was hardly more than a cottage 
when Mr. Ruskin first bought it, a damp and 
ramshackle little place belonging to Linton the 
engraver. He bought it for ;^i5oo, without even 
going to see it, and it cost him several thousand 
pounds to make it comfortable. It stands on a 
platform partly hollowed out of the rock behind ; 
and the rooms which Mr. Ruskin added tower 
up behind the old low front. So steep is the fall 
of the ground that the big studio at the back 
of the house, four storeys up, has a door which 
opens on the wood above. The whole place has 
always to me a half-Italian air about it, like a 
villa among the chestnut woods of the Apennines. 
You approach it by a steep little carriage drive, 
embowered in rhododendrons. As the house 
extended itself backwards into the hill, it swallowed 
up the ground space where a carriage could turn ; 
and so by an ingenious arrangement the drive 
passes under the back of the house itself, through 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 171 

a great stone-arched passage, very Italian in plan. 
It is all plain rough-cast, with square windows, 
and slated with thick blue country slate. The 
comfort of it is that there is no attempt whatever 
at style or taste ; it is a house to live in, not to 
look at. The only signs of Gothic about it are 
a rather cockneyfied octagonal turret at one 
corner, built to secure a wide view over the lake, 
and a row of little Gothic windows, with red 
stone facings, in the dining-room added by Mr. 
Ruskin. It has all the pleasing irregularity of 
a big house which has grown out of a small 
one, full of endless passages and steep little 
staircases. When I last visited it, Mrs. Severn, 
to whom it now belongs, kindly allowed me to 
explore the whole domain, and I was taken round 
by Baxter, Ruskin's valet, a cheerful bald ruddy 
Irishman, who had the rare art of showing me 
what I wanted to see without appearing ever to 
have taken a visitor round before. 

The whole place is extraordinarily simple and 
comfortable ; only gradually does one realise the 
amazing splendour and rarity of the pictures 
which adorn the house. It is kept almost exactly 
as it was when Ruskin died ten years ago, and 
I suppose that the pictures must be worth over 



172 RUSKIN 

a hundred thousand pounds. I cannot say what 
an impression of what the Romans called pietas, 
reverential affection and tenderness, it gives to 
see the place preserved with such loving care. 
To put it as plainly as I can, the locking-up of 
so valuable a treasure of art, which could be so 
easily dispersed, in so simple and unquestioning 
a spirit, merely in order to leave the shrine of a 
great man's life untouched, is an evidence of a 
loyalty as rare as it is noble. 

Let me give you two instances. The dining- 
room contains a great Titian, a Tintoretto, a 
portrait of Raffaelle, probably painted by himself, 
a portrait of Reynolds as a boy, by himself, a 
portrait of Turner as a boy, by himself. 

But more moving still is the sight of Ruskin's 
bedroom, just as it was. A tiny room, with 
one window, an ugly grey paper, drugget on 
the floor ; a heavy clumsy mahogany bed and 
old-fashioned mahogany furniture ; a big book- 
shelf of well-used readable books, poetry, novels, 
and biographies ; and on the walls, in very 
ordinary frames, hung close together, some twenty 
of the most magnificent Turner water-colours in 
the world — and among them a little dreary 
water-colour painting by old Mr. Ruskin, of 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 173 

Conway Castle, about which his father used to 
tell Ruskin a story every morning when he used 
as a little boy to come in before breakfast to 
watch papa shaving. 

That is a moving place, that little room, 
haunted, alas, with very heavy and shadowy fears 
and sorrows, sacred if any room is sacred, not 
to be visited with light-hearted curiosity, but 
with the reverence due to the sufferings of a 
noble spirit. When Mrs. Severn first took me 
there, some years ago, her kind eyes filled 
suddenly with tears which she did not even try 
to dissemble, and I am not ashamed to say that 
I was no less moved, for I knew what her 
thoughts must be. 

Down below is the little low-ceiled study, 
where Ruskin worked, sitting at a round table 
in the bow that looks out upon the lake and the 
mountains. It was there that he penned those 
intensely pathetic words that I have quoted, the 
last he wrote before he sank into the long seven 
years' silence. 

The room itself has the same air of comfort, 
almost bourgeois cosiness, which is so strong a 
note of the house. The mahogany chairs are 
upholstered in a vivid emerald green; there is 



174 RUSKIN 

a writing-table, which used every noon to be 
covered with letters set out to dry, for Ruskin used 
no blotting-paper. There are great presses for 
sketches and manuscripts and minerals ; endless 
pictures of his own, in stacks : it is evidently the 
room of a very hard-working and industrious man, 
who needed to refer to many papers, and to have 
them in perfect order close at hand. But any- 
thing more wholly unaesthetic, more unlike the 
perverted idea of Ruskin cannot be conceived ; 
domestic peace and convenient simplicity are the 
notes of the place. As the old valet said to me, 
showing me a great mass of sketches and notes, 
filling a pile of cardboard boxes, made for the 
Stones of Venice — " Yes^ he was the most in- 
dustrious man I ever saw in my life, was the 
Professor ! " 

There are three pictures in the house which 
I saw with great emotion. One a fine water- 
colour of Ruskin by Richmond, when he was 
twenty-eight. It represents him as a slim and 
graceful man, in white duck trousers strapped 
beneath elegant boots, leaning forward as he 
sits, with a crayon in his hand. His wavy hair, 
his bright complexion, his blue eyes have an air 
of combined sweetness and confidence which is 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 175 

very engaging; you feel in the presence of a 
charming, buoyant and very positive young man, 
full of enjoyment and delight, and quite capable 
of telling all the world what to enjoy and admire. 

Then there is a little sketch, by himself, of 
himself at the age of fifty — the same face, a little 
dimmed and sharpened by life, but with an air of 
vitality and alertness, though possibly a touch of 
primness and downrightness about it. 

Then there is the grand picture of him not 
long before the end, by Mr. Severn. The hair 
is shot with silver, and he has a long flowing 
white beard. The beard greatly improved the 
solemnity and benevolence of his look. His 
mouth had been injured by the bite of a dog 
when he was a child, and had always a somewhat 
pugnacious expression. 

As Burne-Jones once wrote : — 

"The hair that he has grown over his mouth 
hides that often angry feature, and his eyes look 
gentle and invite the unwary, who could never 
guess the dragon that lurks in the bush below." 

But Ruskin had no illusions about his own ap- 
pearance. He wrote to M. Chesneau in 1883 : — 

" Alas, those photographs you read so subtly 
are not worth your pains. The Barbe de Flenvc 



176 RUSKIN 

only came because I was too ill to shave ; and 
all the rest of the face is saddened and weakened 
by anger, disappointment, and various forms of 
luxury and laziness. . . . Carpeaux's would have 
been beautiful, had he been fortunate in his 
youth ; mine would have been stronger had I 
been wwfortunate — /;/ good time ! " 

The e5^es of the portrait are still blue and 
smiling, and the complexion has still that por- 
celain clearness which comes of temperate living 
and pure thoughts. But such a look of patience 
and sadness in the wide-open eyes and great 
drooping eyebrows ! He sits sunk down in a chair, 
looking up and out, as though there was indeed a 
dawn of peace behind the cloud, of which he saw 
the first faint radiance. 

Yet it would be a great mistake to connect only 
mournful or tragic memories with Brantwood. It 
was indeed, as Carlyle said of Fox How, Dr. 
Arnold's house not many miles from Coniston, 
" a temple of industrious peace." Sorrowful and in 
a sense embittered as the drift of Ruskin's thought 
was, he had a great power of recuperation and of 
immersing himself in his work. He was probably 
happier than he knew ; and it is hardly possible to 
have a more beautiful picture of happy and serious 
domestic life than that lived by the circle at 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 177 

Brant wood. His cousin Joanna and her husband 
Arthur Severn, lived with him. The latter is an 
accomplished artist and a man of great social 
charm, while Mrs. Severn is, as I have said, one of 
the people who, by reason of extraordinary unsel- 
fishness, great practical power, devoted affection, 
and humorous perception, radiate a kind of happi- 
ness about them ; their children were born and 
grew up at Brantwood, so that Ruskin had all the 
interests and affections of an almost patriarchal 
circle. Then there were great friends close at 
hand. The Miss Beevers, who lived at the head of 
the Lake, were clever, simple-minded, active and 
sympathetic women, whose relations with Mr. 
Ruskin were sisterly rather than neighbourly. 
Some of his most beautiful and intimate letters 
were written to them. Then the whole estabhsh- 
ment was of a tribal type — the servants were as 
much friends as servants ; and Ruskin by his 
personal charm had a way of establishing friendly 
relations with simple people. He would visit the 
village school to talk to the children, and his letters 
are full of stories of the interests and sayings of the 
girls, rather perhaps than of the boys, of the 
farmers and herdsmen in the fells. As life went 

on he became more tranquil — but he had always 

M 



178 RUSKIN 

lived rather a dual life, the life of lonely reverie 
and a social life as well, in which he just put aside 
his private cares and displayed all his incom- 
parable variety and charm of talk. He was very 
fond of showing his treasures to interested listeners ; 
and the discursiveness of mind which made his 
later public writings so hard to follow was an 
added charm in his conversation. The people 
who came in a solemn mood to Brantwood, as 
if they were going to sit at the feet of a prophet 
like Elijah in a cleft of the rocks, had the nonsense 
taken very quickly out of them at finding a cour- 
teous English gentleman in the middle of a very 
cheerful family circle, and were almost scan- 
dalised when the Professor, as he was called, instead 
of indulging in scathing diatribes on the luxury and 
selfishness of the age, spent the evening in joining 
with more energy than skill in the chorus of 
a nigger melody, or clapping his hands with 
convulsions of laughter at some topical comic 
song. A pompous disciple who called at Brant- 
wood and went away appalled at his hero's levity, 
said sorrowfully afterwards to his friends : " It 
was a great disappointment to find that he is no 
true Ruskinian." One little tradition which I 
heard on the spot is so amusing that I cannot 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 179 

refrain from repeating it here. It was on the 
occasion of one of his later birthdays, when a 
large deputation of his admirers, without giving 
any notice of their intention, appeared at the front 
door of Brantwood, sang a kind of serenade to 
their idol, and then requested to see him. Mr. 
Ruskin was unwell, and not in a very benevolent 
mood. However, he appeared, and the solemn 
disciple who had charge of the proceedings came 
forward, and in language which he believed 
to be appropriate to the taste of the prophet, 
said, " Master, was not that a right jocund strain ? " 
Mr. Ruskin replied, " I am afraid I do not know 
anything about that, and I am sure I am very 
much obliged to you ; but I have a particular desire 
to be left alone, and so I will wish you a very 
good morning." 

It has been sometimes alleged with extraordi- 
nary absurdity that Ruskin was a poseur. He 
had of course just as much of the quality as is 
necessary for a man whose work is that of a 
writer and lecturer and controversialist. He 
liked to express his opinion, and he had no 
objection to expressing it in public. If you hold 
very strong views on many matters of public 
concern, and if you think it important that 



i8o RUSKIN 

other people should adopt your views, you 
naturally wish to express them as effectively as 
possible, and you use the arts which all public 
performers must condescend to. But Mr. Ruskin 
never did condescend to use public arts, except 
the arts of the accomplished pugilist. He was 
a hard hitter of amazing dexterity. But he did 
not hold or express his opinions because he 
wished to enhance his own impressiveness or 
his own fame. Indeed, for years and years he 
risked a very secure fame for the sake of un- 
popular causes and visionary schemes ; and he 
had a very strong sense of his claim to indepen- 
dence, and his right to live his life on his own 
lines. 

And the Hfe he loved was the kind of life he 
lived at Brantwood — simple, comfortable, and 
sociable. He saw a great number of visitors, 
and he was not in the least troubled by incon- 
venient shyness. There was a perpetual suc- 
cession of guests of every kind ; and his work 
over — it was all done as a rule by the time of 
the midday meal — he spent the rest of the day 
in simple domestic recreations. He was fond 
of woodmanship. His soft hat, his hedging- 
gloves and his chopper were very characteristic 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY i8i 

signs of his presence, as they lay on the hall 
table. There was a carpentering woodshop, for 
framing and modelling ; a little fleet of boats 
lay in the miniature harbour, the pier of which 
was built by the young men who assisted him 
in translating Xenophon. There were innumer- 
able pet animals all about. Geological studies 
were always proceeding. There were experi- 
ments going on on the hill for reclaiming waste 
land ; there were all sorts of wells and water- 
courses contrived in the copse for the moorland 
streams : heather and fern were rooted up, and 
the scanty soil prepared for a crop of oats, 
with the result that in the next heavy rains 
not only were the oats carried away, but the 
very field itself, leaving nothing but the bare 
stone hill behind. 

And at home he was always willing to read 
aloud, to play chess, to talk. Let me add 
another little anecdote. There came one day 
a distinguished American to stay at Brant wood. 
To the surprise of the party he became very 
ill at ease at dinner, and appeared to be 
labouring under grave distress of mind ; but 
as the evening went on he recovered his 
spirits. However, the thing had been so marked 



i82 RUSKIN 

that Mrs. Severn, with simple courtesy, asked 
him if anything had occurred to vex him. He 
smiled rather awkwardly, and said, " Yes, I was 
distressed at dinner to hear, as I thought, our 
venerable host spoken of before his face as 
' the cuss,' which is an undignified and rather 
disagreeable term of our own." The fact was 
that Ruskin was in his own circle often called 
by the old abbreviation of the word cousin 
— 'the coz' — which need hardly have disturbed 
the sensibilities of his guest. 

4 
And now I shall ask your leave to give a 
brief account of my one deeply treasured sight 
of Ruskin. I was a boy at Eton, near the 
top of the school. Everything was done in a 
curiously independent fashion at Eton in those 
days. I was President of a Literary Society 
which held meetings ; but instead of our lectures 
being arranged by the authorities, the matter 
was left wholly to ourselves. We invited our 
lecturers, and left them, with the cheerful in- 
difference of youth, to shift wholly for them- 
selves. Sometimes we quartered them on a 
friendly master, sometimes we left them to pro- 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 183 

vide their own dinner and bed. On taking 
office I wrote to half-a-dozen of the most 
eminent men in England, requesting them to 
come down and lecture to us. They must have 
thought it very odd to be invited by a schoolboy, 
but perhaps they did not wholly dislike it. At 
any rate they most of them accepted. Ruskin 
was a mere name to me in those days. I had 
perhaps turned over a volume or two of his 
works, and I expect thought them of little merit. 
Anyhow, he wrote to say he would come, and 
that he would lecture on Amiens. And then 
I think I had half-a-dozen of his letters, very 
friendly and charming, sending packets of draw- 
ings and plans which were to be put in the 
library to be looked at beforehand. I did not 
put them in the library, and I doubt if I even 
acknowledged the letters. We used to manage 
or mismanage the whole affair, fill the library 
with chairs, which were the property of the 
Society, and issue the tickets. I became aware 
that the proceedings were going to be of some 
importance, from the extreme anxiety on the 
part of masters and masters' wives to get tickets. 
And I had several invitations transmitted to me 
to be sent on to Mr. Ruskin, for him to dine 



184 RUSKIN 

and sleep — one in particular from the Head- 
master. These I sent on to him, but he declined 
them all. He said he would drive over in the 
course of the evening, and must go away again 
when the lecture was over ; and that he would 
like a quiet room to sit in for a short rest 
before the lecture ; but that he was ill, and 
could not bear the strain of society. I ap- 
pealed to the Headmaster ; he arranged to have a 
fire in a room called Chambers, in College, 
where Master's meetings were held, and where 
he interviewed offenders ; and he said he would 
send in a cup of coffee for Ruskin. I thought 
no more of the matter. About an hour before 
the meeting, I got a message from the Matron 
to the effect that a gentleman wished to see 
me. I went down, and there standing in the 
Matron's room was the great man himself. 
I can see him as if it were yesterday. He 
was slim in form, but much bowed. He was 
clean-shaven then, and wore his hair rather 
long ; his whole dress was very old-fashioned 
to my eyes. He was dressed in evening clothes, 
and I remember his low-cut waistcoat, his high- 
collared coat, the long linen cuffs that came 
half over his hands, his white gloves. He had 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 185 

with him bundles of papers, and I remember 
the piercing look of his eyes. He looked worn 
and melancholy — he was on the verge of a 
bad illness — but his manner was delightfully 
courteous and natural. I took him to Chambers, 
and he asked me to sit down for a few minutes 
and talk. He seated himself in the Headmaster's 
chair with his elbows on the arms, sipped his 
coffee, and asked me some questions. He was 
vexed, I remember, to find that I had not put 
his pictures in the library, and expressed his 
vexation rather pettishly ; but he talked on very 
gently and kindly, asked me about the Society 
and about the hooks we read — and I remember 
the pleasure which he expressed when he found 
I had read the whole of Walter Scott ; then 
he said suddenly that he must rest. It appeared 
to me rather an affectation at the time. I did 
not know the meaning of the word tired, except 
in connection with football, and imagined older 
people to be impervious to all such weaknesses. 
I can see the look of him as I left the room, 
with his face bowed down over his hand. Then 
I came back to fetch him just before the lecture ; 
and then I shall never forget the clear and 
beautiful tones of his expressive voice, and the 



4 



i86 RUSKIN 



first lovely paragraph which now stands at the 
beginning of one of his books. The lecture 
was quite informal. Indeed, for the only time 
in his life, he had forgotten to bring his MS. 
Sometimes he read a few words, sometimes he 
talked ; and he grew animated every now and 
then, though at first he had seemed weary and 
ill at ease. At the end he said a few words in 
reply to a vote of thanks, shook hands with 
a few friends, and gave me a little sign with 
his head. I walked out with him. There was 
a closed carriage at the door. He asked me 
to see that the papers were put in the library 
for reference, said a very cordial good-bye, and 
drove quickly away. 



LECTURE VI 



By 1 88 1 Ruskin had apparently recovered his 
health. Then he had another brain attack, but 
emerged with renewed vigour, and found abund- 
ance of new things to say. 

"The moment I got your letter to-day," he 
wrote to an old friend, " recommending me not 
to write books ... I took out the last proof 
of last Proserpina and worked for an hour and 
a half on it ; and have been translating some 
St. Benedict material since, with much comfort 
and sense of getting — as I said — head to sea 
again." He took a long tour abroad, and 
finally was able to resume his Professorship. 
Sir W. B. Richmond retired in his favour. 
The result was a more extraordinary concourse 
of listeners than ever. He lectured on the Art 
of England. But though his lectures contained 
some wonderful criticism, and some beautiful 

eloquence — there is a splendid and well-known 

187 



i88 RUSKIN 

passage on the art of Rossetti — yet he seemed 
to have lost the power of connected thought ; 
he disconcerted his hearers too by producing 
the sketches of amateur artists, and declaring 
that no hand like them had been put to paper 
since Lippi and Lionardo. At a lecture, for 
instance, given in Kensington he said : " I have 
never until to-day dared to call my friends and 
my neighbours together to rejoice with me over 
my recovered good or rekindled hope. Both in 
fear and much thankfulness I have done so now ; 
yet not to tell you of any poor little piece of 
upgathered silver of my own, but to show you 
the fine gold which has been strangely trusted 
to me, and which before was a treasure hid 
in a mountain field in Tuscany." This majestic 
encomium was simply to introduce some pen- 
and-ink drawings by a gifted amateur, Miss 
Alexander, authoress of the Roadside Songs of 
Tuscany. 

But his excitability was after this date a dan- 
gerous and trying symptom of his condition. 
A salient instance is his reply to a question 
addressed to him by the Liberal party at Glas- 
gow University, when he was asked in 1880 to 
stand for the Lord Rectorship. He was asked 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 189 

the plain question whether he was a supporter 
of Lord Beaconsfield or Mr. Gladstone. He re- 
plied : — 

" What, in the devil's name, have yott to do 
with either Mr. D'Israeli or Mr. Gladstone ? You 
are students at the University, and have no more 
business with politics than you have with rat- 
catching. Had you ever read ten words of mine 
with understanding, you would have known 
that I care no more either for Mr. D'Israeli or 
Mr. Gladstone than for two old bagpipes with 
the drones going by steam, but that I hate all 
Liberalism as I do Beelzebub, and that, with 
Carlyle, I stand, we two alone now in England, 
for God and the Queen." 

And I may here perhaps add the famous letter 
which he once wrote in reply to a request 
that he would subscribe to pay off a debt on a 
chapel at Richmond : — 

" Sir, — I am scornfully amused at your appeal 
to me, of all people in the world the precisely 
least likely to give you a farthing 1 My first 
word to all men and boys who care to hear 
me is ' Don't get into debt. Starve and go 
to heaven — but don't borrow. Try first beg- 
ging, — I don't mind, if it's really needful, steal- 
ing ! But don't buy things you can't pay for ! ' 

'< And of all manner of debtors, pious people 
building churches they can't pay for are the 



190 RUSKIN 

most detestable nonsense to me. Can't you 
preach and pray behind the hedges — or in a 
sandpit — or a coal-hole — first ? 

" And of all manner of churches thus idioti- 
cally built, iron churches are the damnablest 
to me. 

" And of all the sects of believers in any ruling 
spirit — Hindoos, Turks, Feather Idolaters, and 
Mumbo Jumbo, Log and Fire worshippers, who 
want churches, your modern English Evan- 
gelical sect is the most absurd, and entirely 
objectionable and unendurable to me ! All which 
they might very easily have found out from my 
books — any other sort of sect would ! — before 
bothering me to write it to them. 

" Ever, nevertheless, and in all this saying, 
your faithful servant, 

"John Ruskin." 

But he could not understand why his vehemence 
should be resented, or ridiculed — " the moment I 
have to scold people they say I am crazy," he said 
pathetically. The end of his public life was not 
far off. He struggled through his Oxford lectures, 
and was prevailed upon to give some readings of 
his previous works in the place of three rancorous 
and rambling discourses which he had prepared. 
He continued to work feverishly and unwisely, 
taking up one thing after another and dropping 
them in turn. A vote was passed at Oxford to 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 191 

endow a physiological laboratory and vivisection ; 
he resigned his Professorship at once, and left 
Oxford for ever. He was persuaded to begin 
his autobiography, to put together scattered frag- 
ments of early reminiscences which had appeared 
in Fors, and this for a time restored him to 
tranquillity. The result is, as I have said, one of 
the most beautiful books he ever wrote, Prceterita, 
in which, apart from all controversy and schemes 
of reform, he traced in limpid and delicious 
sentences the memories of his childhood. The 
stream had run clear at last, and the book must 
stand for ever as one of the finest monuments of 
tender reminiscence with the dew of the morning 
and of the evening upon it. And he showed too 
in his book an art so perfect as to be absolutely 
oblivious of itself, issuing in what seems an in- 
genuous ecstasy of pure presentment. 

But he was not able to finish it ; he had planned 
out the whole book. He went down to Seascale 
and tried to work. " But now he seemed," says 
Professor Collingwood, " lost among the papers 
scattered on his table ; he could not fix his mind 
upon them and turned from one subject to another 
in despair, and yet patient and kindly to those 
with him whose help he could no longer use, and 



192 RUSKIN 

who dared not show — though he could not but 
guess it — how heartbreaking it was." So he put 
it all aside, and wrote one last chapter to record 
the truest companionship of his life, " Joanna's 
Care." 

The clouds swept down on him again. And at 
last he saw that his work was done. He was 
seventy, and he had more volumes to his credit 
than any living English writer. He determined to 
wait for the end, little guessing how long that wait- 
ing would be ; he steadily refused every kind of 
work or mental exertion, and was rewarded for it 
by a tranquillity of life and spirit such as he had 
never before enjoyed. He attended to a little 
business, dictated a few letters, and even allowed 
his early poems to be reprinted. He had now 
given away the whole of his capital, and his only 
income was from his books, but that was a large 
one, and enabled him to live as he wished, 
and to exercise a large generosity as well. 
Honour came to him — strangely ironical rewards 
— and there now grew up about him a mys- 
terious reverence, for men began to see through 
the vehemence and the fury of his later expression, 
to realise how purely and generously he had lived, 
how loftily he had schemed and thought, and how 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 193 

great was his legacy to the world. His eightieth 
birthday was the signal for a great outburst of 
praise and congratulations — flowers, letters, tele- 
grams, addresses poured in. But he was past 
caring for such things. He crept about quietly, 
strolled in the open air, had a few letters read 
to him, and even indicated replies. He spoke 
little. Mr. Gordon Wordsworth, the grandson 
of the poet, has told me how in these latter 
days he used to go to see the old man. He 
was received in silence with a warm handshake 
and a smile. He would begin to talk about 
anything which he thought might interest Ruskin, 
particularly about foreign travel. " You can im- 
agine how I felt," he said, " ventilating my ex- 
tremely crude ideas about pictures and buildings 
to the great art-critic." Ruskin used to nod and 
smile — and then suddenly he would kindle into 
definite interest, and let fall some quiet criticism 
or memorable dictum. His mind seemed as strong 
as ever, but remote, lost in some incommunicable 
dream, and not easily to be recalled. There was 
no trace of delusion or wandering intellect ; only 
he could not be roused. He seemed, said Pro- 
fessor Collingwood, " like the aged Queen Aud in 
the saga, who rose late and went to bed early, 

N 



194 RUSKIN 

and if any one asked after her health, she 

answered sharply." 

Of Mr. Ruskin's closing years at Brantwood 

Professor Collingwood gives us some touching 

pictures in his Life. I will content myself with 

the following extract : — 

" Walking out had become a greater weariness 
to him, and he had to submit to the humiliation of 
a bath-chair. To save himself even the labour of 
creeping down to his study, he sat usually in the 
turret-room upstairs, next to his bed-chamber, but 
still with the look of health in his face, and the fire 
in his eyes quite unconquered. He would listen 
while Baxter (his valet) read the news to him, 
following public events with interest, or while 
Mrs. Severn or Miss Severn read stories, novel 
after novel ; but always liking old favourites best, 
and never anything that was unhappy. Some pet 
books he would pore over, or drowse over, by the 
hour. The last of these was one in which he had 
a double interest, for it was about ships of war, and 
it was written by the kinsman of a dear friend. 
Some of the artists he had loved and helped had 
failed him or left him, but Burne-Jones was 
always true. One night, going up to bed, the old 
man stopped long to look at the photograph from 
Philip Burne-Jones's portrait of his father. " That's 
my dear brother Ned," he said, nodding good-bye 
to the picture as he went. Next night the great 
artist died, and of all the many losses of these later 
years this one was the hardest to bear." 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 195 

His life just touched the last year of the century. 
On the 20th of January 1900, after an attack of 
influenza, he suddenly failed, and fell softly asleep 
as the sunset came out beyond the fells. 

He was buried at Coniston ; and perhaps of all 
the tributes he received in death the truest and 
best was a little wreath of common flowers sent by 
the local tailor, with the words inscribed : ''There 
was a man sent from God, and his name was 
John." 

2 

Let me try then in a few words, now that I 
have painted the outer portrait of the man, to 
sketch the inner portrait of the spirit, which is a 
far older and a far more lasting thing than the 
mortal body in which for a few years it is bound 
Ruskin came into the world gifted with the most in- 
tense power of ocular perception and observation. 
That runs through his whole work. In his delightful 
autobiography you can read how the little boy, with 
no toys to speak of, spent hours in counting the 
bricks of the opposite house-fronts, and tracing the 
patterns of the carpet on which he crawled ; and 
how delightful to him was the sight of the pure 
stream of water, that rose so mysteriously from 



196 RUSKIN 

the ground when the water-cart man unlocked the 
springs with his key, and filled his wheeled tank. 
And thus Ruskin kept all his life long the power of 
looking into things and seeing their smallest details; 
so that when he says that he sees this and that 
in a picture, which it is impossible for ordinary 
eyes to detect, we may at least be sure that he had 
looked longer at what he is describing than we are 
ever likely to do, and with a patience, as a German 
critic once wrote, that verges upon frenzy. And 
beside that he had an intense and sensuous pleasure 
in forms and curves, in tints and colours ; across 
the texture of the world, which seems so meaning- 
less to some of us, his swift brain traced subtle 
outlines and viewless perspectives : and for him too 
the whole of a scene flushed and glowed in a way 
that we perhaps can hardly comprehend, or lost 
itself in weft of opalescent mist and shadows of 
ethereal tincture. The vocabulary of colour is 
employed from end to end by Ruskin, and never 
either vaguely or imaginatively. And then too he 
had the same sort of an eye for words, so that the 
very winds and skies of earth breathed themselves 
into music. That was his outfit. But beyond all 
that he had a brain of incredible agility, which 
leapt in a flash from what was beautiful to what 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 197 

was stern, and, we may be thankful, from what 
was solemn to what was humorous. There is 
seldom any strain or tension about his writing ; 
for he relieves it almost instinctively just when the 
pressure becomes acute, by a swift turn of irony 
or pathos which refreshes the spirit. 

He suffered perhaps as much as he gained 
from the extremely secluded character of his 
life. But I think his guarded childhood and 
boyhood were probably a benefit to him. He 
did indeed concentrate his energies too much ; 
but he came into the larger world, in spite of 
his inner dogmatism, with a curiously beautiful 
sort of humility, an eager desire to win, and 
a courtesy which made him always put out his 
powers. Some one once said of him that it was 
the most touching thing in the world to see 
Ruskin, when he was already a well-known man, 
being snubbed and bidden to hold his tongue 
by his old mother, and the gracious sweetness 
with which he obeyed. But above all things 
he had a temperament which is called, and 
with what mistaken depreciation I will not stop 
to consider, a feminine temperament. It meant 
in Ruskin's case an extreme sensitiveness, an in- 
tense desire to be in affectionate and emotional 



198 RUSKIN 

contact with his circle ; a pretty touch of vanity, 
which was all the more harmless because he so 
constantly confessed it and deplored it ; a great 
love of quiet, well-ordered, cosy ways of life, 
and a generosity that was never ashamed of 
confessing its fault with tears. His letters, in 
their tenderness, their emotional quality, their 
caressing fondness, are such as many a bluff 
and sensible man may despise and dislike. But 
for all that it is that kind of secret current of 
affection that sets from father to child, from 
brother to sister, from friend to friend, which 
binds up the wounds of the world and makes 
renunciation a more beautiful thing even than 
success. 

And then — because I do not mean this to 
be a flattering portrait — there was in him what 
I have already described, a real, deep-seated, 
hard belief in his own absolute rightness and 
justice ; and I do not disguise it. The greatest 
men of all have seen clearly enough the eternal 
distinction between right and wrong, generous 
and mean, kindly and cruel. But they have 
lost themselves more in sorrow than in anger 
at the poison of sin, and have seen the beau- 
tiful creature which lies, we dare to hope, within 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 199 

the foulest and most ugly human manifestation. 
But Ruskin did not look deep enough for that. 
He talked too much about scolding and punish- 
ing people. As Lady Ambrose says in the New 
Republic J at the conclusion of Mr. Herbert's great 
harangue : — 

"What a dreadful blowing-up Mr. Herbert gave 
us last night, didn't he ? Now that, you know, 
I think is all very well in a sermon ; but in a 
lecture, where the things are supposed to be 
taken more or less hterally, I think it is a little 
out of place." 

It is this, it may frankly and sorrowfully be 
confessed, that spoils much of his work — the 
implication that if you do not agree with him 
you are certainly stupid and probably vicious. 
Some have said that he learnt this from the 
Puritanism of his father and mother, and their 
contempt for weak-minded and disorderly people 
— but it is something far deeper than that. It 
might have been a little fostered in the still 
atmosphere of his childhood, by the sight of 
a father and mother, whom he knew to be 
kind and just, claiming to be so certain in 
their condemnations. But if he had not had 
a taste for fault-finding himself, he would have 



200 RUSKIN 

grown to recoil from it all the more at the 
nearer touch of it — for in the lives of great 
men it is true to say that they often grow 
great, so to speak, by contraries, and learn from 
early influences quite as much what to mistrust 
as what to admire. I have often wondered 
whether in those last broken years of silence 
and musing, he was not often being sorry in a 
childlike way for his great fault, his own great 
fault, and perhaps in that happy penitence which 
is the joy of the angels. I would not make light 
of this harsh strain in him, and if in a sense it 
was the blemish in his mind, it was at least the 
cause of the heavenly and noble struggle which 
he fought out day by day. 

But no one could have gathered round him, 
as Ruskin did, the almost passionate affection, 
in which there was always something of com- 
passion, of so many wise and noble men and 
women ; and one can forgive, with that sort of 
forgiveness that is three parts admiration, a fault 
which after all was lit by generous fires, and 
which was the shadow cast upon his words 
and deeds by the blaze of spirit with which 
he loved all that was true and pure and 
beautiful. 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 201 

3 

Now in dealing with this strange and beautiful 
life, so sharply divided into sadness and delight, 
this character at once so noble and so narrow, 
so intense and yet so yielding, I want to leave one 
point very clearly in your minds. The interest 
of Ruskin's life is the interest of a personality, 
and I want you to try to regard him in that light, 
and not either as prophet, or a reformer, or an 
art-critic, or a writer. He was all these things 
by turns — they were but the guises which this 
restless and ardent temperament assumed. As a 
prophet, he was unbalanced and unconvincing, 
because he had depth rather than width of view. 
He did not see the whole problem. He saw 
clearly enough into the hearts of like-minded 
people, but he was essentially a partisan, and con- 
demned what he did not understand as severely 
as he condemned what he hated. He took, from 
his education and his sheltered life, a meagre view 
of the world. He had little sympathy with robust 
strength, and wide tracts of human nature, at its 
bluntest and soundest, were entirely obscure to 
him. And thus his reprobation was so extrava- 
gant that it made no appeal, not even the appeal 



202 RUSKIN 

of shame and terror, to those whom he inveighed 
against most fiercely. Then too he did not even 
do justice to his age ; he overlooked one of the 
best and strongest forces of the time — the resolute 
search for truth, the stern determination of the 
scientific spirit not to generalise till it has investi- 
gated. He went wrong himself in every depart- 
ment of his work, from his passion for generalisation 
and his acquiescence in incomplete investigation. 
What made his protests ineffectual was that he 
believed himself to have a perfectly analytical 
mind. His mind was indeed analytical, when 
he applied it to questions which he understood, 
and to workers with whom he sympathised. But 
he had no notion of just comparison, and when 
his sympathy was not enlisted he could not even 
analyse. He had the power of putting vague per- 
sonal preferences into language superficially exact, 
and this was a terrible snare to him and to his 
followers, who believed that they were getting 
logical reasons when they were only getting in- 
stinctive predilections. Yet I am far from saying 
that as a prophet his work was thrown away. He 
was no ascetic, as I have said, and thus he was 
able to see the dangers of the materialism that is not 
uplifted by the concurrence of the soul. But he 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 203 

felt that the invariable comfort in which he lived 
to some extent invalidated his message. " If I 
had lived in a garret," he once wrote, ^' then I 
could have preached that Queen Victoria should 
do the same." But as I have said before, he 
accepted with a sort of unquestioning loyalty the 
precise standard of material luxury in which he 
had been himself brought up, and he regarded 
any extension or development of this as base and 
degrading. Yet he was here in the main right, 
because he saw that the bane of the age is its 
impatience of simplicity, its worship of success, 
its preference of comfort, and its mistaking the 
quality of pleasure. 

As a reformer he made even worse shipwreck 
partly because he was but little acquainted with 
the precise condition of affairs which he under- 
took to reform, and partly because he tried to 
impose his own private and quite unimportant 
tastes upon the persons whom he claimed as 
disciples. The men as a rule who have made 
disciples, and have worked out an ideal of 
practical life, like Bernard of Clairvaux, Francis 
of Assisi, Ignatius Loyola, have been men who 
on the one hand claimed and practised an abne- 
gation of conventional comforts — a process which 



204 RUSKIN 

has a very distinct pleasure for human beings — but 
whose consistency, personal charm, and authori- 
tativeness sustained and rewarded their followers. 
But Ruskin made no sweep of comforts, no simpli- 
fication of conditions ; he merely attempted to 
forbid the luxuries for which he had no taste, 
while his consistency was incomplete and his task 
for personal authority small. He had not the gift 
of making his personal approval the one supreme 
reward coveted by his followers — he could not 
exalt himself into a little Deity ; and thus he was 
called Master mainly by men who were not in per- 
sonal touch with him. He said once, " No true 
disciple of mine can ever be a Ruskinian. He will 
follow not me, but the instincts of his own soul 
and the guidance of his Creator." But for all 
that, though he had not the gift of the maker 
of definite institutions, we must not make the 
mistake of underestimating his work as a re- 
former. He did see into the weakness of Com- 
mercialism, and he grasped the fact that the 
only real socialism must be based on individ- 
ualism. He saw that the mechanical theory 
of labour and of trade competition was essentially 
degrading, because it did not evoke the gifts of the 
individual, and rewarded shrewdness rather than 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 205 

industry. And here he threw his whole weight 
into the right scale. His grasp of economical 
details was unsound, but his insight into true 
economical principles was clear enough, because 
he saw that the mistake made was to treat it all 
as an exact and pure science, instead of a science 
which must take account of psychological prin- 
ciples. 

As an art-critic he certainly established a new 
tradition, and the very narrowness of his tech- 
nical knowledge was probably one of the con- 
ditions of his success. He was dealing with a 
nation which is not innately artistic, which has 
a mild and rather pathetic desire to care for 
art, a nation which can produce, in painting, 
landscapes of extraordinary beauty and portraits 
of wonderful animation and delicacy, but which 
has failed in most other kinds of delineation. 
And in architecture, which was his other great 
province, he was dealing with a nation which 
once, it seems, possessed a tradition of its own, 
and a power of designing great buildings, but 
which had lost its firmness of conception and 
originality of design, and had become little 
more than an accompHshed copyist, or an in- 
genious combiner of purloined detail. 



2o6 RUSKIN 

In the region of painting, he persuaded the 
languid coteries to abjure an academic tradition 
of admiration, and a mawkish tradition of pre- 
sentation, in favour of a different but still narrow 
scheme of preferences, and a servile acceptance 
of unquestionable greatness. He gave Turner 
an extravagant place, and he held out a hand 
to that singular revolt known as Pre-Raphaelitism, 
the impulse of which has passed into the dignity 
of upholstery, and has done little more than 
infect native art with a precious kind of mediae- 
valism. 

But here again he did great work. He set 
the public thinking about art, and almost per- 
suaded it that it cared for art. He made art 
serious and he made it respected ; and here his 
teaching may yet bear fruit, though it was 
disfigured by his ethical bias, which confused 
the truth of things, by trying to refer two per- 
fectly separate impulses — the moral and the 
artistic — to one basis. I myself believe that the 
English feeling for art is a very placid sentiment, 
with little that is passionate about it ; but though 
it has not yet attained much vitality, it may 
develop in the future : and even if Ruskin did 
not sow the seed, he at least hoed up the fallow. 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 207 

And then as a writer he can hardly be said 
to have estabHshed a tradition, because his art 
depended upon so intimate and personal a charm. 
I am thankful myself that he did not establish 
a tradition in this respect — for while such a 
tradition is a great sign of commanding influence 
in a writer, it is a sign of a corresponding 
weakness in his followers. Writers must learn 
to express their thoughts in their own way ; 
and it is better to borrow thoughts than to 
purloin a medium. The art of literary imitation 
is a very easy one, and needs only a very 
second-rate gift. Small wonder that we English- 
men, trained on so narrow a classical tradition, 
should be so prone to rank literary imitation 
high. Boys who have been taught that the 
best Latin verse and prose is the most ingenious 
cento of phrases, not imitated but transferred 
from classical writers, may be excused if they 
rank the gift of imitation above that of forcible 
expression. I mean to discuss the style of 
Ruskin elsewhere, but I hold that one of his 
supreme felicities was that his mind was not 
cramped by a classical education. I do not 
undervalue that education for other purposes ; 
it lends some exactness of thought and some 



2o8 RUSKIN 

terseness of expression to practical minds. But 
Ruskin is only one of the notable instances 
which go far to prove that the greatest writers 
of the century — Keats, Walter Scott, Carlyle, 
Browning — were men who hardly came under 
classical influences at all ; while other great 
writers — Wordsworth, Tennyson, Byron, and 
Shelley — obtained no distinction in academical 
exercises ; and the few great writers whom our 
universities rewarded, such as Matthew Arnold, 
Newman, and Pater, can hardly be ranked 
among the leading literary influences of the 
century. 

And let me here add the strange and somewhat 
whimsical summary which Ruskin gave of his 
own life-work, a short time before he sank into 
the final silence. 

" For in rough approximation of date nearest 
to the completion of the several pieces of my 
past work, as they are built one on the other, — 
at twenty, I wrote Modern Painters; at thirty, 
The Stones of Venice; at forty. Unto this Last; at 
fifty the Inaugural Oxford Lectures ; and if Fors 
Clavigera is ever finished as I mean — it will mark 
the mind I had at sixty ; and leave me in my 
seventh day of life, perhaps — to rest. For the 
code of all I had to teach will then be, in form, 
as it is at this hour, in substance, completed. 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 209 

Modern Painters taught the claim of all lower 
nature on the hearts of men ; of the rock, and 
wave, and herb, as a part of their necessary 
spirit life ; in all that I now bid you to do, to 
dress the earth and keep it, I am fulfilling what I 
then began. 

'' The Stones of Venice taught the laws of con- 
structive Art, and the dependence of all human 
work or edifice, for its beauty, on the happy 
life of the workman ; Unto this Last taught the 
laws of that life itself, and its dependence on 
the Sun of Justice; the Inaugural Oxford Lectures, 
the necessity that it should be led, and the 
gracious laws of beauty and labour recognised, 
by the upper, no less than the lower, classes 
of England ; and lastly, Fors Clavigera has declared 
the relation of these to each other, and the only 
possible conditions of peace and honour, for 
low and high, rich and poor, together, in the 
holding of that first Estate, under the only 
Despot, God, from which whoso falls, angel or 
man, is kept, not mythically or disputably, but 
here in visible horror of chains under darkness 
to the judgment of the great day : and in 
keeping which service is perfect freedom, and 
inheritance of all that a loving Creator can 
give to His creatures, and an immortal Father 
to His children : 

"This, then, is the message, which, knowing 
no more as I unfolded the scroll of it, what 
next would be written there, than a blade of 
grass knows what the form of its fruit shall be, 

O 



2 10 RUSKIN 

I have been led on year by year to speak, even 
to this its end. 

And now it seems to me, looking back over 
the various fragments of it written since the year 
i860. Unto this Last, Time and Tide, Munera 
Piilveris, and Eagle's Nest, together with the 
seven years' volumes of Fors Clavigcra, that it 
has been clearly enough and repeatedly enough 
spoken for those who will hear : and that, after 
such indexed summary of it as I may be able 
to give in the remaining numbers of this seventh 
volume, I should set aside this political work 
as sufficiently done ; and enter into my own 
rest, and your next needed service, by completing 
the bye-law books of Botany and Geology for 
St. George's Schools, together with so much law 
of art as it may be possible to explain or exhibit, 
under the foul conditions of the age." 



4 
There is yet another point on which stress 
must be laid, and that is Ruskin's incredible 
and dangerous industry ; as he once wrote, " Life 
without industry is guilt ; and industry without 
art is brutality." Let us compare him with his 
great contemporary Carlyle, in whom long periods 
of solid diligence alternated with long stretches of 
mournful indolence. Carlyle was a sayer of great 
truths, and I am not so mean as to try to under- 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 211 

value his splendid service to his generation. But 
Carlyle was not possessed by the intense desire 
to do tangible and practical things for mankind, 
though he said that a solidly built bridge was 
a finer and a holier thing than the best book ever 
written ; and there is truth in the humorous words 
of FitzGerald, that Carlyle had sat pretty com- 
fortably in his study at Chelsea, scolding all the 
world for not being heroic, and yet not very 
precise in telling them how. But the record 
of Ruskin's life and his busy days is not like 
this. He was consumed by a demon of activity. 
Consider the sort of day which he used to spend 
in Venice, rising with the dawn, drawing, as 
he humorously said, one half of a building while 
the masons were employed in pulling down the 
other half, taking measurements, noting details, 
doing this for ten hours at a stretch till the 
shadows had shifted ; then going back to write, 
read and talk; and this not once or twice a week, 
but day by day for months together. Remember 
the kind of life he lived in Oxford, talking, lec- 
turing, working, teaching in his drawing school, 
and then going back to his home to work and 
read, with an endless flood of letters pouring 
in upon him day by day, which he answered fully. 



212 RUSKIN 

patiently, courteously, and humorously, never 
taking refuge behind fixed phrases, but putting 
a part of himself into every sentence he ever 
penned. And all the while he was planning 
museums and arranging collections, while his 
researches into natural things were not merely 
a poetical contemplation or a dilettante catching 
of effects, but hard discrimination and careful 
experiment. I do not believe that there was ever 
a life lived of such tremendous activity, and none 
of it mechanical toil, but heart-wasting and brain- 
consuming work. The wonder is not that his 
brain gave way, but that it did not collapse long 
before. Even a conversation was not an easy 
thing for Ruskin. He was always willing to see 
and talk to strangers as well as friends ; he never 
was absorbed or preoccupied, but he put his 
heart into his talk ; he never declined upon im- 
pressive platitudes, but he turned on the full 
strength of his mental current, whatever was his 
need of silence and rest. 

He has by some been shamefully accused 
of pose. The mischief of that criticism is that 
there is something in it. '< To the vanity," he 
once wrote, " I plead guilty — no man is more 
intensely vain than I am ; but my vanity is set 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 213 

on having it kiioivn of me that I am a good 
master, not in having it said of me that I am 
a smooth author. My vanity is never more 
wounded than in being called a fine writer, 
meaning — that nobody need mind what I say," 

But of course it may be admitted that in the 
case of all men who live for and in performance, 
whether it be on sackbut or dulcimer, on stage 
or in pulpit, with brush or pen, it is impossible 
to eliminate a dash of the essential mountebank — 
the quality which, reduced to its lowest formula, 
may be summed up in the words, " See me do it ! " 
and the child who began by saying from his 
nursery pulpit " People, be good," was sure on 
occasion to say more than he knew, and indeed 
had reason to be thankful if he did not say more 
than he meant. 

But the essence of the poseur is this, that all 
that he does, he regards from the point of view, 
not of the effect it may have on others, or for the 
share that he may take in the service of the 
world, but that the echo and reflection of his 
effectiveness may come back to him from the 
mouths and eyes of men, like the airy chords 
which come back from precipice and crag at 
the blast of some Alpine horn. The poseur does 



214 RUSKIN 

not desire to be served, but to be known to serve. 
It is his own content, and not the content of 
others that he is in search of. It is no happiness 
to him to have added to the peace of the world, 
if he is unpraised and unhonoured. No one can 
be unaware of the comforting warmth of fame, 
earned or unearned ; but that was not what 
Ruskin wanted. And it is a vile calumny to say 
that he worked for his own honour and satisfac- 
tion. He desired to increase and multiply joy ; 
he did increase it a hundredfold, and most when 
he was himself sorrowful even unto death. 

I do not want here to disguise his faults : he 
was exacting, suspicious, irritable and wayward. 
He had none of the bluff good-humour, the 
sturdy dutifulness of the solid type of EngHsh- 
man, who does fine work in the world. He 
could not bear to be thwarted or opposed. He 
was dogmatic, self-opinionated, and vain ; but these 
faults are but the seams and channels in the 
weather-worn crag, which would otherwise be 
but a meaningless pyramid of stone. We ought 
not to love the faults of great men or to condone 
them, but we may love them because of their 
faults, and because of the gallant fight they made 
with them, with an intensity and a compassion 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 215 

that we cannot give to statuesque and flawless 
lives. The whole thing, in its enthusiasm, its 
guilelessness, its passion for all that is pure and 
beautiful, is so infinitely noble, that I for one 
can but regard it with an awe and a gratitude 
that is half wonder and half shame — wonder 
at a thing so great, and shame that one can be 
so far away from what a man may be. 

5 

And so one is brought back to the fact that it 
was as a personality that Ruskin had his effect on 
the generation ; and that personality I shall try to 
delineate, though of all things in the world per- 
sonality is the hardest thing to estimate, for one 
simple reason, that a character is not only, as is 
often supposed, a mixture of ingredients, like a salad 
or a stew, the net result of which is grateful and 
savoury. It may be looked at in that aspect, and 
it is true enough that in dealing with people for 
ordinary social purposes, one is justified in regard- 
ing temperaments in this light, as compounded 
dishes, where a certain balance and proportion of 
qualities makes the effect of a personality pungent 
or fragrant, commonplace or repellent, as the case 
may be. But when it comes to the deeper 



2i6 RUSKIN 

relations of life, when one is concerned with loving 
and admiring people, being moved by what they 
say or think, imitating them, even worshipping 
them, there come in two further qualities, which 
are not only a question of blend and proportion, 
but two perfectly distinct things — two qualities 
which are diiBcult to disentangle and analyse, 
because they permeate other qualities, making 
them on the one hand attractive and on the other 
emphatic. And these two great qualities are on 
the one hand charm, and on the other moral force. 
It is very hard to say what charm is, and in what 
it consists. It is a thing which some people 
possess to an extraordinary degree, making all 
that they do or say interesting and beautiful, 
penetrating gesture and movement, feature and 
voice, so that it all seems a revelation of some 
secret and inner beauty of soul and mind. Yet 
this charm is in itself and by itself a dangerous 
thing, for it often coexists without any great 
degree of moral force, and lives so much in its 
own power of pleasing, that it is often apt to lead 
its owner to make any sacrifices if only he can 
please. And thus because such charm is as much 
felt by the evil and sensual as by the high-minded 
and pure, it sometimes falls a victim quite early in 



I 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 217 

life to gross and robust influences, and is carried 
off captive over dark seas of experience, like some 
beautiful slave to serve the passion of evil masters. 

And then too there is a further kind of charm, 
which is not a superficial charm, but the fragrance 
of a sweet-tempered, simple, and peaceable char- 
acter, which wins regard and trust because it is 
modest and trustworthy, reasonable and sympa- 
thetic, and does not easily condemn or despise. 
Such as these have a way of drawing out and 
evoking the best of others, and are loved partly on 
that account. 

Now Ruskin had both of these kinds of charm. 
It may again be stated that though he was often, 
in his public utterances, vehement, bitter, and 
incisive, these qualities did not appear in his private 
intercourse or in his talk. He was in ordinary 
companionship extraordinarily graceful and win- 
ning, courteous and considerate. Not only was 
his own talk flowing and suggestive, and full of 
beauty both of thought and word, but he had a 
power of comforting and reassuring the shy and 
awkward, of deftly taking up and embellishing 
the murmurs of embarrassed people, yet without 
seeming to make them his own. And he had too a 
delightful frankness, which made his companions feel 



2i8 RUSKIN 

that he was saying what he thought, and giving his 
best. In this he was Hke Carlyle, who grumbled 
and fuhninated, heaven knows, in his writings, 
but whose private vehemences and violences were 
corrected by a glance both humorous and tender, 
which took off the edge of his incisiveness and 
sugared the bitter cup. And Ruskin too, in his 
public lectures, had an incomparable atmosphere 
of grace and pathos about him. His high, clear, 
and delicate voice rose like the voice of the wind ; 
his vehement and brilliant gestures amplified and 
interpreted his words ; and his flashing eyes, with 
their pale-blue light, now indignant and now 
appealing, intercepted and electrified the glances 
of his hearers. There was little of the art of the 
orator about him — little of that voluminous thunder 
which in men like Mr. Bright or Mr. Gladstone 
dominated an audience and kept them spell-bound, 
waiting on every measured word. Compared to 
these the eloquence of Ruskin had an almost 
feminine quality ; it was the music of the soul that 
made itself heard, whether in the passionate 
enthusiasm for some work of delicate grace or 
suggestive beauty, or the poignant personal distress, 
the uncomforted cry for faith and strength, which 
came with such an appealing frankness from his lips. 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 219 

And then of that other quality, which I have 
called moral force, which is like the steam of the 
engine or the charge of the gun — that force of 
conviction which drives a truth home into careless 
or indifferent minds — this he had in fullest mea- 
sure. It may be thought that part of Ruskin's 
sick vision of the world, the insistence with which 
the meanness, the stupidity, the indifference, the 
cruelty of humanity beat upon him, came from 
within rather than from without. And of course 
such melancholy as his does reach and react upon 
the overstrung brain. One in Ruskin's frame of 
mind selects, by an instinctive sadness, those 
elements of experience and fact which confirm his 
hopeless outlook ; and thus his sadness is deepened 
and fed. 

But for all that he had the power, which I have 
spoken of before, — and which is a power confined 
to the truest and noblest of human spirits, — that 
power of concerning itself not with its own comfort 
and welfare, but with the welfare of the world, and 
grieving intolerably over evils which seem so 
unnecessary, and which yet are so impossible to 
prevent or to cure. The selfish man, at the sight 
of suffering and misery, asks brutally, " Am I my 
brother's keeper ? " or he shrugs his shoulders 



220 RUSKIN 

cynically at what he does not approve, or even 
takes a secret and complacent pleasure in the 
thought that he enjoys immunity from such 
troubles, or perhaps even congratulates himself on 
the strength and prudence which have preserved 
him from such catastrophes. That is the attitude 
of the Pharisee and the tyrant, and it is by that 
temper that the worst evils of the world are pro- 
pagated and perpetuated. 

But Ruskin, and such as Ruskin, cast themselves 
with a blind fury of indignation and anger into 
the fray. They are so sensitive to all injustice 
and to all brutality, that they lose themselves in 
scathing words, and feverish phrases of horror 
and disgust and despair. And then when the 
schemes that seem to such prophets so simple 
and so desirable, so effective in helping humanity 
out of the mire, all break down and incur ridicule 
and contempt, what wonder if they fall into 
wretchedness and frenzy at the thought of all the 
happiness which men throw away for themselves, 
and the happiness of which men deprive others out 
of mere wantonness and carelessness? It was here, 
I think, that the strength of Ruskin's message lay. 
Men who see and feel as he did are the hope 
of the human race, because they show that the 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 221 

moral temperature is slowly but surely rising, and 
that the generous and noble impulses of the con- 
science and the heart are on the increase. And 
Ruskin had to my mind one distinguishing mark of 
the true prophet — that he was no patriot. He was 
concerned with human rather than with national 
welfare. I am not decrying the force of patriot- 
ism, or the part it plays in the development of the 
human race. But there is a nobler enthusiasm 
even than the enthusiasm for race and nation ; be- 
cause the triumph of patriotism must necessarily 
carry with it the quenching of the aspirations of 
other nations, their defeat and their discomfiture. 
It is only tyranny on a larger scale. Ruskin no 
doubt miscalculated and misunderstood the nature 
of his countrymen, the insularity and the isolation 
which marks their conquering path. But no one who 
cares for the larger hopes of humanity can hope 
or dream that the end is to be limited by national 
greatness. That is not a popular vision in England, 
unless it is accompanied by a proviso that the seat 
of the federated government of the world shall 
be in London, and that English shall be the 
language of the human race. But Ruskin judged 
other nations not according to their resemblance 
to our own race, but by their virtue and nobility. 



222 RUSKIN 

And it must be kept in mind that he was, Hke all 
the greatest figures of our late nineteenth century 
— Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle — a moralist before 
anything else. England, said a great French 
critic, is pre-eminent for the seriousness with 
which she has treated moral ideas in art ; and 
there is no disguising the fact that morality and 
not art is our main concern. Part of Ruskin's in- 
fluence was due to the fact that he based art on 
morality ; and there is little doubt that if he had 
preached art as vehemently for its own sake, he 
would have found but few listeners and fewer 
disciples. 

It is then as a personality and as a moralist 
that we have to regard him ; as a man of clear 
vision, relentless idealism, and kindling speech ; 
who above all manifested the splendid instinctive 
abnegation of private happiness, not calculating 
loss and gain in a spirit of barter, but finding 
contentment impossible, while others were ill- 
content ; that spirit which is expressed by a 
parable in the beautiful words of the Song of 
Songs : " They made me the keeper of the vine- 
yards ; but mine own vineyard have I not kept." 

And now I will say one last thing to which 
all that I have said has been leading — a thing 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 223 

borne to me upon the winds and waves of life, 
by grievous experience, and, I am not ashamed 
to say, by sad self-questioning. And this thing 
is confirmed, in its height and depth, by the 
wonderful life that we have been considering. 
No saint or philosopher has ever done more 
than guess, in fear and perplexity often, and 
rarely in confidence or certainty, at the meaning 
of our life, our pilgrimage. So much of life, 
in spite of its glimpses of joy and light, seems 
so aimless, so perplexed, so unaccountable, with 
its mysterious satisfactions, its disproportionate 
sorrows. But the best and noblest of men have 
seemed to see in it a chance, if we are frank and 
candid in facing experience, and if we are not 
dismayed by its shadows or misled by its sun- 
shine, a chance of having something done for 
our spirits which can be done in no other way, 
A good many people start with a high-hearted 
belief in life and its possibilities ; and then like the 
grain sown by the Heavenly Sower, many lives 
are withered by sensuality, or choked by pros- 
perity, or eaten up by evil influences, or drenched 
by dulness ; but whatever happens we are not 
meant to find life easy and delightful ; it is a 
discipline, when all is said and done. But there 



224 RUSKIN 

is something deeper than that. " Depend upon 
it," said old Carlyle, " the brave man has somehow 
or other to give his hfe away." We are called 
upon to make an unconditional surrender. Un- 
conditional I say, because it cannot be on our 
own terms. We cannot reserve what we like, 
or choose what we prefer. It is a surrender to 
a great and awful Will, of whose workings we 
know little, but which means to triumph, whatever 
we may do to hinder or delay its purpose. We 
must work indeed by the best light that we have. 
We must do the next thing, and the kind thing, 
and the courageous thing, as it falls to us to do. 
But sooner or later we must yield our wills up, 
and not simply out of tame and fearful sub- 
mission, but because we at last see that the Will 
behind all things is greater, purer, more beautiful, 
more holy than anything we can imagine or 
express. Some find this easier than others — 
and some never seem to achieve it — which is 
the hardest problem of all. But there is no peace 
without that surrender, though it cannot be made 
at once ; there is in most of us a fibre of self-will, 
of hardness, of stubbornness which we cannot 
break, but which God may be trusted to break 
for us, if we desire it to be broken. And the 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 225 

reason why the life of Ruskin is so marvellous 
a record, is that we here see the unconditional 
surrender, of which I speak, made on the most 
august scale by a man dear to God, starting in 
life with high gifts and noble advantages. 

Will you bear with me if I entreat you to 
discern this truth not in the life of Ruskin but 
in your own lives as well ? Do not think for a 
moment that 1 mean that life ought to be a 
mournful metaphysic, without light and energy 
and jo3^ The more of these that we have in 
our lives the better for each and all. But if 
the light is clouded, and the joy is blotted out, 
and the energy burns low, it is a sign not that 
we have failed, but that the mind of God is bent 
still more urgently upon us. What we may 
pray for and desire is courage, to live eagerly 
in joy and not less eagerly in sorrow ; to be 
temperate in happiness, and courageous in trouble ; 
that we may say in the words of Ruskin's great 
poet-friend, whose splendid optimism still made 
the great surrender — 

" What's Life to me ? 
Where'er I look is fire ; where'er I listen 
Music ; and where I tend, bliss evermore." 



LECTURE VII 



There is a great deal scattered about through 
Ruskin's various books of the development of 
his literary style, and of the various influences 
which helped to mould it. His own account 
of the matter is very interesting, not because it 
offers a key to the mystery, but because it wholly 
fails to explain anything or to account for any- 
thing. It is rather as though a painter were to 
say what kinds of brushes he used, and where 
he got his colours ; but the instinct by which 
the artist knows that a blot of paint of a 
certain shape and in a certain juxtaposition 
will produce the effect upon the eye of a 
moss-grown stone, or of a tuft of meadow- 
grass, this is the incommunicable and the in- 
explicable thing. It is the same with language. 
We have all of us all the material to work with 
which Ruskin had. The thoughts are not wholly 
original or unfamiliar. We can most of us con- 

336 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 227 

struct a grammatical sentence, and it is in our 
power if we choose to make lists of striking words. 
But what we cannot command is the delicate ripple 
of mood, the ironical emphasis, the contrast of 
humour and pathos, the subtle insistence on the 
central thought, the logical staircase that leads 
to the peremptory climax. Then too comes in 
the art of the coherent paragraph, the paren- 
thesis that refreshes and sustains the thought, 
the melodious cadence of words, the subtle 
alliteration. Ruskin had, first of all, intensity 
of feeling, then great lucidity of expression — 
I do not feel that his intellectual grasp is very 
great. He can, or he could in earlier days, 
follow a definite path, and pick his way very 
directly, to the goal, avoiding the thoughts which 
are not the exact ones that he needs, and which 
tend by their similarity to the central thought 
to confuse the less precise thinker ; but he had 
not the gift of a wide survey, the power which 
very impressive writers have of letting the whole 
body of thought just influence and contribute to, 
without distracting or blurring, the central point. 
He had a splendid gift of picturesque illustration, 
and in the earlier days a wonderful power of 
metaphor — of expressing one thought in the terms 



2 28 RUSKIN 

of another, which is the essence of the poetical 
gift. And then, though he never mastered the 
limitations of poetry — he was indeed mastered 
by them — his poetical work gave him a great 
range of vocabulary, and a matchless power 
of amassing together words beautiful in them- 
selves, and infinitely enhanced by their contact 
with other words. 

Pope was one of his masters, he says, for 
absolute lucidity of expression, perfect balance 
and conciseness, and complete freedom from 
anything otiose or disproportioned. One knows 
too that he fell at one time under the influence 
of Hooker, and that part of Modern Painters 
was written under the sway of Hooker's stately 
deliberation and his incomparable cogency of 
thought. And further, he states that he owed 
much to Dr. Johnson, in respect of clear and 
just statement, orderly sequence, and harmonious 
evolutions. 

But he insists that he owed his vocabulary, 
his sense of rhythm and cadence, the solemnity 
and dignity of his vocabulary, entirely to his 
study of the Bible. 

Here is the passage in which he makes the 
above statement : — 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 229 

"I have above said that had it not been for 
constant reading of the Bible, I might probably 
have taken Johnson for my model of English. 
To a useful extent I have always done so ; in 
these first essays, partly because I could not 
help it, partly of set, and well set, purpose. 

"On our foreign journeys, it being of course 
desirable to keep the luggage as light as possible, 
my father had judged that four little volumes of 
Johnson — the Idler and the Rambler — did, under 
names wholly appropriate to the circumstances, 
contain more substantial literary nourishment 
than could be, from any other author, packed 
into so portable compass. And accordingly, in 
spare hours, and on wet days, the turns and 
returns of reiterated Rambler and iterated Idler 
fastened themselves in my ears and mind ; nor 
was it possible for me, till long afterwards, to 
quit myself of Johnsonian symmetry and balance 
in sentences intended, either with swordsman's or 
pavior's blow, to cleave an enemy's crest, or 
drive down the oaken pile of a principle. I 
never for an instant compared Johnson to Scott, 
Pope, Byron, or any of the really great writers 
whom I loved. But I at once and for ever re- 
cognised in him a man entirely sincere, and 
infallibly wise in the view and estimate he gave 
of the common questions, business, and ways of 
the world. I valued his sentences not primarily 
because they were symmetrical, but because they 
were just, and clear ; it is a method of judgment 
rarely used by the average public, who ask from 



230 RUSKIN 

an author always, in the first place, arguments 
in favour of their own opinions, in elegant terms ; 
and are just as ready with their applause for a 
sentence of Macaulay's, which may have no more 
sense in it than a blot pinched between doubled 
paper, as to reject one of Johnson's, telling against 
their own prejudice, — though its symmetry be as 
of thunder answering from two horizons." 

This is to a certain extent true ; but the truth 
lies deeper still ; Ruskin did not really find his 
style until he had finally and effectually freed 
himself from all such influences. He began by 
having a rich and sonorous vocabulary, a strong 
sense of balance and antithesis, preference for 
rolling rhetoric and answering clauses. The 
effects are patent and indisputable ; but it is 
rhetoric, and sometimes almost bombast. It is 
like a child pla^ang with thunderbolts, and finding 
it excellent fun. The sentences smell of the 
platform and of the pulpit ; they are youthfully 
resplendent, and dogmatic with the infallibility of 
inexperience. One feels the writer is saying, '' Here 
we go," and half the joy of it lies, not in having 
something to say, but in saying it so loud and clear. 
Of course when all is said, it is the work of a man 
of genius, but it is hard, metallic, made-up writing. 
There are plenty of fine things said and trumpeted 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 231 

out ; but it is in no sense great work, except in 
its fine vigour and peremptoriness, and in the 
promise of mastery given by the fervent analysis 
and boisterous energy. 

Here is an instance of the measured Johnsonian 
manner : — 

" He who has built himself a hut on a desert 
heath, and carved his bed, and table, and chair 
out of the nearest forest, may have some right 
to take pride in the appliances of his narrow 
chamber, as assuredly he will have joy in them. 
But the man who has had a palace built, and 
adorned, and furnished for him, may indeed have 
many advantages above the other, but he has 
no reason to be proud of his upholsterer's skill ; 
and it is ten to one if he has half the joy in his 
couch of ivory that the other will have in his 
pallet of pine." 

In the following passage, which stood in the 
first and second editions of Modern Painters, 
but was cancelled in the third, he describes the 
treatment of Venice by certain great artists. 
He concludes : — 

" But let us take, with Turner, the last and 
greatest step of all. Thank heaven, we are 
in sunshine again, — and what sunshine ! Not 
the lurid, gloomy, plague-like oppression of 
Canaletti, but white, flashing fulness of dazzling 



232 RUSKIN 

light, which the waves drink and the clouds 
breathe, bounding and burning in intensity of joy. 
That sky, — it is a very visible infinity, — liquid, 
measureless, unfathomable, panting and melting 
through the chasms in the long fields of snow- 
white, flaked, slow-moving vapour, that guide the 
eye along their multitudinous waves down to 
the islanded rest of the Euganean hills. Do 
w^e dream, or does the white forked sail drift 
nearer, and nearer yet, diminishing the blue 
sea between us with the fulness of its wings ? It 
pauses now ; but the quivering of its bright 
reflection troubles the shadows of the sea, those 
azure, fathomless depths of crystal mystery on 
which the swiftness of the poised gondola floats 
double, its black beak lifted like the crest of a dark 
ocean bird, its scarlet draperies flashed back from 
the kindling surface, and its bent oar breaking the 
radiant water into a dust of gold. Dreamlike and 
dim, but glorious, the unnumbered palaces lift 
their shafts out of the hollow sea, — pale ranks 
of motionless flame, — their mighty towers sent up 
to heaven like tongues of more eager fire, — their 
grey domes looming vast and dark, like eclipsed 
worlds, — their sculptured arabesques and purple 
marble fading farther and fainter, league beyond 
league, lost in the light of distance. Detail after 
detail, thought beyond thought, you find and feel 
them through the radiant mystery, inexhaustible as 
indistinct, beautiful, but never all revealed ; secret 
in fulness, confused in symmetry, as nature 
herself is to the bewildered and foiled glance, 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 233 

giving out of that indistinctness, and through that 
confusion, the perpetual newness of the infinite 
and the beautiful. 

"Yes, Mr Turner, we are in Venice now," 

Let me here frankly confess that to myself 
the style of the Modern Painters is not wholly 
attractive. It is too argumentative and rhetori- 
cal, didactic rather than persuasive, and the 
device grows monotonous by which the thought 
gets gradually infused by emotion, until it cul- 
minates in one of those rich rolling sentences, 
which break like a huge sea-billow, full of sound 
and colour and motion. But the beauty of the 
great sentences themselves are indisputable, the 
perfect certainty of touch, the feeling that he 
is never mastered by his material, but has all 
the substance of language at his command — 
these qualities are patent and undeniable. But 
one feels rather as Queen Victoria is recorded 
to have said of Mr. Gladstone, that she disliked 
her interviews with him because he talked to 
her as if she was a public meeting. There is 
a sense of being clamoured at and overwhelmed, 
rather than of being led and persuaded. And 
there is something more than bitterness in 
Whistler's famous criticism when he said that 



234 RUSKIN 

Ruskin was possessed of " a flow of language 
that would, could he hear it, give Titian the 
same shock of surprise that was Balaam's, when 
the first great critic proffered his opinions." 

Ruskin wrote, as we know, with singular ease, 
but at the same time he took immense pains. 
He rose very early, and did his writing in the 
freshness of the day, and it was his habit to 
read aloud at breakfast, to his family or his 
fellow-travellers, what he had written, for their 
approval rather than for their criticism. 

The characteristics which I have mentioned 
mark all his earlier work. You will find them 
in his earliest papers, those elaborate studies of 
cottage architecture in various countries, which 
he contributed when hardly more than a boy 
to a magazine : and this manner culminates in 
the Stones of Venice, in which he showed the ulti- 
mate development of this didactic and rhetorical 
art. 

Then we come to the middle manner — the 
later volumes of the Modern Painters and the 
books like Sesame and Lilies. Here the vehemence 
is a good deal abated ; there is a substitution, 
so to speak, of wood for wind ; the blare of 
the cornet is exchanged for the softer melody 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 235 

of what the Greeks called " the spittle-wasting 
flute." The style has lost in hardness and 
gained immensely in beauty. There is still a 
love of balance and antithesis; but it is now 
more a question of orderly sequence and struc- 
ture — the counterpoint is less visible. And here 
I may say is the point at which the ordinary 
reader stops. The man of taste and intelligence 
can perceive as a rule the faults of the earlier 
manner, its gusty eloquence, its sharp-cut melody. 
He can detect the mellifluous beauty of the 
new cadences, the more equable texture ; if he 
sees the art of it less, he is aware still more 
subtly that it is there. And I would not say 
a word to shake any one's faith in the perfection 
of the art, or his admiration of the more 
chastened mood. Irony, tender and delicate 
enough, has taken the place of trenchant censure 
or sharp sarcasm, Ruskin allows himself to 
feel more in public, to employ more intimate 
emotions, more delicate mysteries of thought. 
A touch of failure and suffering has laid its 
chastening hand upon the page ; he is not less 
sure, but he is less dogmatic ; and he has learnt 
that men must be persuaded rather than com- 
manded to believe. 



236 RUSKIN 

Here are one or two instances of this fine 
manner. Tiie first is a very famous passage on 
Calais church, of which he himself did not 
wholly approve, because he thought that the 
word-painting of it distracted the minds of his 
readers from more valuable considerations. 

" I cannot find words to express the intense 
pleasure I have always in first finding myself, 
after some prolonged stay in England, at the 
foot of the old tower of Calais church. The 
large neglect, the noble unsightliness of it ; the 
record of its years written so visibly, yet without 
sign of weakness or decay ; its stern wasteness 
and gloom, eaten away by the Channel winds, 
and overgrown with the bitter sea grasses ; its 
slates and tiles all shaken and rent, and yet not 
falling ; its desert of brickwork full of bolts, 
and holes, and ugly fissures, and yet strong, like 
a bare brown rock ; its carelessness of what any 
one thinks or feels about it, putting forth no claim, 
having no beauty nor desirableness, pride, nor 
grace ; yet neither asking for pity ; not, as ruins 
are, useless and piteous, feebly or fondly garrulous 
of better days ; but useful still, going through its 
own daily work, — as some old fisherman beaten 
grey by storm, yet drawing his daily nets : so it 
stands, with no complaint about its past youth, in 
blanched and meagre massiveness and serviceable- 
ness, gathering human souls together underneath 
it ; the sound of its bells for prayer still rolling 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 237 

through its rents : and the grey peak of it seen 
far across the sea, principal of the three that rise 
above the waste of surfy sand and hillocked 
shore, — the Hghthouse for Hfe, and the belfry for 
labour, and this for patience and praise." 

And the following is a piece which illustrates 
his ironical manner, a description from the fourth 
volume of Modem Painters of Claude's picture of 
the Mill :— 

" The foreground is a piece of very lovely and 
perfect forest scenery, with a dance of peasants 
by a brook side ; quite enough subject to form, 
in the hands of a master, an impressive and com- 
plete picture. On the other side of the brook, 
however, we have a piece of pastoral life ; a man 
with some bulls and goats tumbling headforemost 
into the water, owing to some sudden paralytic 
affection of all their legs. Even this group is 
one too many ; the shepherd had no business to 
drive his flock so near the dancers, and the 
dancers will certainly frighten the cattle. But 
when we look farther into the picture, our feelings 
receive a sudden and violent shock, by the un- 
expected appearance, amidst things pastoral and 
musical, of the military ; a number of Roman 
soldiers riding in on hobby-horses, with a leader 
on foot, apparently encouraging them to make an 
immediate and decisive charge on the musicians. 
Beyond the soldiers is a circular temple, in ex- 
ceedingly bad repair ; and close beside it, built 



1 



238 RUSKIN 

against its very walls, a neat watermill in full 
work. By the mill flows a large river with a weir 
all across it. The weir has not been made for the 
mill (for that receives its water from the hills by 
a trough carried over the temple), but it is parti- 
cularly ugly and monotonous in its line of fall, 
and the water below forms a dead-looking pond, 
on which some people are fishing in punts. The 
banks of this river resemble in contour the later 
geological formations around London, constituted 
chiefly of broken pots and oyster-shells. At an 
inconvenient distance from the water-side stands 
a city, composed of twenty-five round towers and 
a pyramid. Beyond the city is a handsome 
bridge ; beyond the bridge, part of the Campagna, 
with fragments of aqueducts ; beyond the Cam- 
pagna, the chain of the Alps ; on the left, the 
cascades of Tivoli." 

The following passage is from The Seven Lamps 
of Architecture : — 

'' An architect should live as little in cities as a 
painter. Send him to our hills and let him study 
there what nature understands by a buttress, and 
what by a dome. 

"There was something in the old power of 
architecture, which it had from the recluse more 
than from the citizen. The buildings of which I 
have spoken with chief praise, rose, indeed, out of 
the war of the piazza, and above the fury of the 
populace : and Heaven forbid that for such cause 
we should ever have to lay a larger stone, or rivet 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 239 

a firmer bar in our England ! But we have other 
sources of power, in the imagery of our iron 
coasts and azure hills ; of power more pure, nor 
less serene, than that of the hermit spirit which 
once lighted with white lines of cloisters the glades 
of the Alpine pine, and raised into ordered spires 
the wild rocks of the Norman sea ; which gave to 
the temple gate the depth and darkness of Elijah's 
Horeb cave ; and lifted, out of the populous city, 
grey cliffs of lonely stone, into the midst of sailing 
birds and silent air." 

And here is a wonderful word-cadence from 
one of his later lectures at Oxford, where he is 
speaking of the dove : — 

" And of these wings and this mind of hers, 
this is what reverent science should teach you : 
first with what parting of plume and what soft 
pressure and rhythmic beating of divided air she 
reaches that miraculous swiftness of undubious 
motion compared with which the tempest is slow 
and the arrow uncertain : and secondly what clue 
there is, visible, or conceivable to thought of man, 
by which, to her living conscience and errorless 
pointing of magnetic soul, her distant home is felt 
afar beyond the horizon, and the straight path, 
through concealing clouds, and over trackless 
lands, made plain to her desire, and her duty, by 
the finger of God." 



240 RUSKIN 



And here, as I have said, many firm believers 
part company with Ruskin, as disciples have before 
now forsaken their master. In Fors Clavigera, a 
reader, however faithful, is apt to be disconcerted by 
the tense passion of emotion, the fantastic changes 
and counterchanges, the inconsequent sequence of 
statements, the fiery restlessness, the wild dis- 
cursiveness, the dim presence of something diseased 
and terrifying in the background, that seems to 
cry and weep. But I have no sort of doubt that 
in Fors Clavigera Ruskin reached a far higher level 
of art than he had ever reached before, because he 
was doing a thing which is not, I believe, attempted 
elsewhere in literature. He was thinking aloud. 
If any of you will try an experiment in this process 
you will find the incredible difficulty of the task. 
You know how most of us in idle moments, or 
perhaps even more in moments when we are 
officially supposed to be occupied, lapse into a 
reverie, in which a stream of thought — it may be 
placid, it may be vehement — sweeps through the 
brain from the flushed reservoir of the mind. 
Suppose you check yourself suddenly in one of 
these reveries. Try to put down in words what 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 241 

you have been thinking of, and as you thought it. 
You will find it to be ludicrously impossible. 
Half the thoughts have passed without clothing 
themselves in any vesture of word, one thing has 
suggested another, often enough by some trivial 
similarity of superficial form. The whole thing is 
evasive, elusive, irrecoverable. Yet it was exactly 
this which Ruskin did. He had attained by native 
instinct and by enormous industry a power of 
words to which I hardly know any equal. Perhaps 
Browning might have attained it, if he had worked 
in prose. But what is more wonderful still is the 
kaleidoscopic variety of emotion — serious, profound, 
indignant, tender, humorous, menacing, severe, 
playful, ironical moods — which flash and twinkle 
like a rippling sea. It is not merely the repre- 
sentation of a sustained mood, to which many 
great writers have attained ; it is the representation 
of moods as various, and transitions as swift, as ever 
passed through a human mind. The process by 
which the very stuff of the soul here takes shape 
is, I own, utterly incomprehensible to me, because 
it seems not so much different in scope, but 
different in kind from anything which any other 
writer has ever dreamed of attempting. 

And now, out of the deep upheaval of thought, 

Q 



242 RUSKIN 

the wreck of all his old security and self-confidence, 
the devastating sadness which laid its hand upon 
him, he developed a perfectly new manner of 
writing, which seems to me to belong to a wholly 
different and infinitely higher range of art. He 
threw aside all that was frigid and academical and 
formal ; he retained the lucid emphasis and the 
rich texture of language. But instead of compos- 
ing a stately and impressive argument, he gained a 
new art, that of thinking his thought into words. 
Perhaps this testified to a certain lack of mental 
concentration ; but the result is that instead of 
seeing the mind in posture and performance, you 
can look into it like a clear stream, and watch 
every break and ripple of the crystal tide. The 
result is a kind of ease, which seems the most 
absolutely effortless and spontaneous thing, and 
yet it is a thing which none but the very highest 
masters of style and expression have achieved. 
Indeed I will say frankly that I know of no writer 
in the world except Plato who has achieved this. 
There are writers, like Scott and Thackeray, who 
got the same command over their medium ; but 
theirs is a simpler task, because they deal only with 
narrative and the play of definite emotions. But 
Ruskin was moving in a loftier and more complex 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 243 

intellectual region, that of reflective emotion, where 
the very ideas are vague and mist-like, and the 
task is rather to give a sense of the atmosphere of 
the mind rather than its definite judgments and 
conclusions. 

He reached then the height of his power in 
Fors Clavigera, which achieves that triumph of 
literary genius, the sense that the reader is within 
the very four walls of the writer's mind. Of 
course writing may be used for many purposes, 
and among these purposes are some that are 
achieved best when all sense of personality is 
withdrawn. But the real goal which lies behind 
such art is that of self -revelation. It is a great 
mistake to suppose that this means that a writer 
should do nothing but talk about himself. That is 
not the point at all — indeed it is one of the surest 
ways of avoiding the sense of personality. A man 
may entertain you, point out his possessions, talk 
continuously and persistently about his tastes and 
preferences, and yet leave you knowing nothing 
of the spirit within. But Ruskin admits you to 
the inmost shrine of his spirit, where the soul 
is naked and unashamed. You see the pulsing 
blood and the palpitating heart. Nothing is hidden 
from you, nothing forced upon the view. And it 



244 RUSKIN 

all culminated in the exquisite Prceterita, which for 
utter frankness and directness has no equal. It is 
not as though he were bidding you count his 
wounds, share his vanished joys, compassionate 
his sorrows. He is far past all that. His own 
heart has given him all the comfort of which 
it is capable, and far more pain than any faith 
or philosophy can staunch or heal. Like the 
Ancient Mariner or the Last Minstrel, he tells 
his tale, in obedience to the primal law of utterance. 
He looks for no reward nor applause ; he merely 
unburdens himself of the awful, the mysterious 
secret of life. 

Here is as much as I dare quote of a letter in 
Fo7s Clavigera, entitled " The Elysian Fields " : — 

" I. My Friends, — The main purpose of these 
letters having been stated in the last of them, it 
is needful that I should tell you why I approach 
the discussion of it in this so desultory way, writing 
(as it is too true that I must continue to write) 
' of things that you little care for, in words that 
you cannot easily understand.' 

" I write of things you care little for, knowing 
that what you least care for is, at this juncture, 
of the greatest moment to you. 

" And I write in words you are little likely 
to understand, because I have no wish (rather 
the contrary) to tell you anything that you can 



A STUDY IN PP:RS0NALITY 245 

understand without taking trouble. You usually 
read so fast that you can catch nothing but the 
echo of your opinions, which, of course, you are 
pleased to see in print. I neither wish to please 
nor displease you ; but to provoke you to think ; 
to lead you to think accurately ; and help you to 
form, perhaps, some different opinions from those 
you have now. 

" 2. Therefore, I choose that you shall pay me 
the price of two pots of beer, twelve times in the 
year, for my advice, each of you who wants it. 
If you like to think of me as a quack doctor, you 
are welcome ; and you may consider the large 
margins, and thick paper, and ugly pictures of 
my book, as my caravan, drum, and skeleton. 
You would probably, if invited in that manner, 
buy my pills ; and I should make a great deal 
of money out of you ; but being an honest 
doctor, I still mean you to pay me what you 
ought. You fancy, doubtless, that I write — as 
most other political writers do — my ' opinions ' ; 
and that one man's opinion is as good as another's. 
You are much mistaken. When I only opine 
things, I hold my tongue ; and work till I more 
than opine — until I know them. If the things 
prove unknowable, I, with final perseverance, hold 
my tongue about them, and recommend a like 
practice to other people. If the things prove 
knowable, as soon as I know them, I am ready 
to write about them, if need be ; not till then. 
That is what people call my ' arrogance.' They 
write and talk themselves, habitually, of what they 



246 RUSKIN 

know nothing about ; they cannot in anywise 
conceive the state of mind of a person who will 
not speak till he knows; and then tells them, 
serenely, 'This is so; you may find it out for 
yourselves, if you choose ; but, however little you 
may choose it, the thing is still so.' 

" 3. Now it has cost me twenty years of thought, 
and of hard reading, to learn what I have to 
tell you in these pamphlets ; and you will find, 
if you choose to find, it is true ; and may prove, 
if you choose to prove, that it is useful : and I 
am not in the least minded to compete for your 
audience with the ' opinions ' in your damp 
journals, morning and evening, the black of them 
coming off on your fingers, and — beyond all 
washing — into your brains. It is no affair of 
mine whether you attend to me or not ; but 
yours wholly ; my hand is weary of pen-hold- 
ing — my heart is sick of thinking ; for my own 
part, I would not write you these pamphlets 
though you would give me a barrel of beer, 
instead of two pints, for them : — I write them 
wholly for your sake ; I choose that you shall 
have them decently printed on cream-coloured 
paper, and with a margin underneath, which 
you can write on, if you like. That is also 
for your sake ; it is a proper form of book for 
any man to have who can keep his books clean ; 
and if he cannot, he has no business with books at 
all. It costs me ten pounds to print a thousand 
copies, and five more to give you a picture ; and 
a penny off my sevenpence to send you the book : 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 247 

— a thousand sixpences are twenty-five pounds ; 
when you have bought a thousand Fors of me, 
I shall therefore have five pounds for my trouble 
— and my single shopman, Mr. Allen, five pounds 
for his ; we won't work for less, either of us ; not 
that we would not, were it good for you ; but 
it would be by no means good. And I mean 
to sell all my large books, henceforward, in the 
same way ; well printed, well bound, and at a 
fixed price ; and the trade may charge a proper 
and acknowledged profit for their trouble in re- 
tailing the book. Then the public will know what 
they are about, and so will tradesmen ; I, the 
first producer, answer, to the best of my power, 
for the quality of the book ; — paper, binding, 
eloquence, and all : the retail dealer charges what 
he ought to charge, openly ; and if the public 
do not choose to give it, they can't get the book. 
That is what I call legitimate business. Then 
as for this misunderstanding of me — remember 
that it is really not easy to understand anything, 
which you have not heard before, if it relates to a 
complex subject ; also, it is quite easy to mis- 
understand things that you are hearing every day 
— which seem to you of the intelligiblest sort. 
But 1 can only write of things in my own way 
and as they come into my head ; and of the 
things I care for, whether you care for them or 
not, as yet. I will answer for it, you must care 
for some of them in time. 

" 4. To take an instance close to my hand : you 
would of course think it little conducive to your 



248 RUSKIN 

interests that I should give you any account of the 
wild hyacinths which are opening in flakes of blue 
fire, this day, within a couple of miles of me, in the 
glades of Bagley wood through which the Empress 
Maud fled in the snow (and which, by the way, I 
slink through, myself, in some discomfort, lest the 
gamekeeper of the college of the gracious Apostle 
St. John should catch sight of me ; not that he 
would ultimately decline to make a distinction be- 
tween a poacher and a professor, but that 1 dislike 
the trouble of giving an account of myself). Or, 
if even you would bear with a scientific sentence 
or two about them, explaining to you that they 
were only green leaves turned blue, and that it was 
of no consequence whether they were either green 
or blue ; and that, as flowers, they were scientifi- 
cally to be considered as not in existence, — you 
will, 1 fear, throw my letter, even though it has 
cost you sevenpence, aside at once, when I remark 
to you that these wood-hyacinths of Bagley have 
something to do with the battle of Marathon, and 
if you knew it, are of more vital interest to you 
than even the Match Tax. 

" 5. Nevertheless, as I shall feel it my duty, 
some day, to speak to you of Theseus and his 
vegetable soup, so, to-day, I think it necessary to 
tell you that the wood-hyacinth is the best English 
representative of the tribe of flowers which the 
Greeks called ' Asphodel,' and which they thought 
the heroes who had fallen in the battle of Marathon, 
or in any other battle, fought in just quarrel, were 
to be rewarded, and enough rewarded, by living in 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 249 

fields-full of ; fields called, by them, Elysian, or 
the Fields of Coming, as you and I talk of the 
good time ' Coming,' though with perhaps different 
views as to the nature of the to be expected 
goodness." 

And last of all he wrote the Prceterita. Much 
of it was only gathered afresh from the pages of 
Fors Clavigera. But here I think that, in spite of 
age and shattered health and broken mind, the 
art is at its very highest. The brain gathers itself 
together for a last effort before the silence falls. 
And here no doubt many readers who cannot find 
their way through the bewildering tangle of 7'ors, 
can join hands again ; because here again the 
mood is a sustained one. It is like a man high on 
a mountain range, seeing through a gap of ragged 
cloud and sweeping storm the sunny spaces of the 
valley he has left behind, and to which he may 
no more return, tracing his happy wanderings by 
hedge and stream, watching the smoke go up from 
the chimneys of the house that has sheltered alike 
his radiant hopes and his quiet dreams ; and seeing 
it all through a passion of sadness and failure 
and disappointment, which is too deep for any 
tear or sigh. There are passages in Prceterita 
which seem to me like wreckage sinking through 



250 RUSKIN 

the sea-depths, leaving the rout and fury of scream- 
mg wind and wide-flung billow, and grounding at 
last softly and quietly upon the unstirred sand, with 
no further to go, no resurrection to dread. The 
cup of wrath has been drunk, the last sad drops of 
the potion wrung out ; he has experienced in life 
what others only experience in death, and he can 
say with bowed head and failing lip, " It is over." 

Here are two characteristic passages: — 

" The first joy of the year being in its snow- 
drops, the second, and cardinal one, was in the 
almond blossom, — every other garden and wood- 
land gladness following from that in an unbroken 
order of kindling flower and shadowy leaf ; and 
for many and many a year to come, — until indeed, 
the whole of life became autumn to me, — my 
chief prayer for the kindness of heaven, in its 
flowerful seasons, was that the frost might not 
touch the almond blossom." 

And again : — 

"My delight in these cottages, and in the 
sense of human industry and enjoyment through 
the whole scene, was at the root of all pleasure 
in its beauty ; see the passage afterwards written 
in the Seven Lamps insisting on this as if it were 
general to human nature thus to admire through 
sympathy. I have noticed since, with sorrowful 



I 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 251 

accuracy, how many people there are who, wher- 
ever they find themselves, think only ' of their 
position.' But the feeling which gave me so 
much happiness, both then and through life, 
differed also curiously, in its impersonal character 
from that of many even of the best and kindest 
persons. 

" In the beginning of the Carlyle-Emerson 
correspondence, edited with too little comment 
by my dear friend Charles Norton, I find at page 
18 this — to me entirely disputable, and to my 
thought, so far as undisputed, much blameable 
and pitiable, exclamation of my master's : * Not 
till we can think that here and there one is 
thinking of us, one is loving us, does this waste 
earth become a peopled garden.' My training, 
as the reader has perhaps enough perceived, 
produced in me the precisely opposite sentiment. 
My times of happiness had always been when 
nobody was thinking of me ; and the main dis- 
comfort and drawback to all proceedings and 
designs, the attention and interference of the 
public — represented by my mother and the 
gardener. The garden was no waste place to 
me, because I did not suppose myself an object 
of interest either to the ants or the butterflies ; 
and the only qualification of the entire delight 
of my evening walk at Champagnole or St. 
Laurent was the sense that my father and mother 
were thinking of me, and would be frightened 
if I was five minutes late for tea. 

" I don't mean in the least that I could have 



252 RUSKIN 

done without them. They were, to me, much 
more than Carlyle's wife to him ; and if Carlyle 
had written, instead of, that he wanted Emerson 
to think of him in America, that he wanted his 
father and mother to be thinking of him at 
Ecclefechan, it had been well. But that the rest 
of the world was waste to him unless lie had 
admirers in it, is a sorry state of sentiment 
enough ; and I am somewhat tempted, for once, 
to admire the exactly opposite temper of my own 
solitude. My entire delight was in observing with- 
out being myself noticed, — if I could have been 
invisible, all the better. I was absolutely interested 
in men and their ways, as I was interested in 
marmots and chamois, in tomtits and trout. If 
only they would stay still and let me look at 
them, and not get into their holes and up their 
heights ! The living inhabitation of the world — 
the grazing and nesting in it, — the spiritual power 
of the air, the rocks, the waters, — to be in the 
midst o'f it, and rejoice and wonder at it, and 
help it if I could, — happier if it needed no help 
of mine, — this was the essential love of Nature 
in me, this the root of all that I have usefully 
become, and the light of all that I have rightly 
learned." 

3 
Now the strange thing behind it all is this — and 
what I am about to say involves a clear statement 
about the critical apprehension of the British public 



I 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 253 

which must not be confused with censure or 
contempt. It is neither. It is simply a fact. 
Ruskin attained his position in the Hterary world, 
and in the view of many worthy persons maintains 
it now, by work that was not only inferior, but 
was pervaded by gross faults of dogmatism, 
erring knowledge and baseless judgments. His 
best work is still to a great extent unappreciated 
and unpraised, his genius hardly suspected. The 
British public wanted correct information, im- 
pressive argument, and conventional conclusions. 
What was the joy of that stolid and pathetic 
cHent^le, when it found a man who could bully 
them into thinking that they cared about art, tell 
them exactly what pictures to buy and what to 
neglect, give eloquent reasons which made them 
believe they had gone to the bottom of the matter, 
and then — the crowning joy of all — tell them with 
thunders of conviction that the old moral law 
held good there as everywhere, that the bad man 
was the bad artist and the good man the good 
artist. It was a prodigious and colossal error ; 
but it went straight to the heart of the nation ; it 
confirmed the Psalms of David and the law of 
Moses ; it fitted in, or so they thought, with the 
teaching of the Gospel and St. Paul. They were 



254 RUSKIN 

delighted when Ruskin said, " In these books of 
mine, their distinctive character, as essays on art, 
is their bringing everything to a root in human 
passion or human hope . . . every principle of 
painting which I have stated is traced to some 
vital or spiritual fact . . . and is founded on a 
comparison of their influences on the life of the 
workman, a question by all other writers on the 
subject wholly forgotten or despised," At such 
a statement as this the enthusiasm of the public 
knew no bounds, because not only did it issue 
from a graduate of Oxford, and thus had the 
stamp of academic culture, but it was a conclusion 
worthy of a sermon, with this additional advan- 
tage that it was not a statement made by a clergy- 
man from a pulpit, and thus open to a suspicion 
of professional motive, but made by a layman 
in a book of art criticism, and was thus a con- 
firmation of the most respectable sort of morality, 
from a source which might naturally have been 
liable to a charge of dangerous bohemianism. 

It was this that gave Ruskin his authority ; 
though there were of course a few who saw 
somewhat deeper, and realised that there was in 
the utterances of Ruskin a passionate emotion 
and a sincere fidelity to truth, only obscured 



I 



i 
I 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 255 

by natural dogmatism and a rigid calvinistic 
training. 

And then came the years when he seemed to 
throw aside wantonly and quixotically all the 
influence he had gained, and to flourish in the 
face of the pubHc all sorts of crazy fancies and 
impossible dreams. In these years he was greatly 
discredited, though at last the sale of his books 
went up by leaps and bounds. The most chari- 
table hypothesis freely indulged was that he was 
out of his mind. Nothing else could account 
for such ludicrous sincerity and such delirious 
schemes. But by this time many true spirits had 
discerned him rightly, and saw that if he was 
fallen into a passion of irritability and disgust, 
he was crazed not by disease but by the pressure 
of desperate thoughts. Perhaps his Professorship 
a little rehabilitated him in the eyes of the outer 
public. And then he did what is the most 
popular thing that one can do in England, an 
act which sets the crown upon any amount of 
even inefficient endeavour : he grew old, and 
became a public pet — a grand old man. 

There is something to smile at in all this, no 
doubt ; but there is food for something more 
like tears. Perhaps the point is that, with his 



256 RUSKIN 

best unrecognised and with his secret misunder- 
stood, he yet had gained a hearing ; and it may 
be that thus his real influence will grow and 
bear fruit. But the process is so gigantically 
stupid and so outrageously coarse — the sense 
that derisive notoriety can achieve what genius 
and worth could not attain, is not without its 
shadow. The horror of it is this, that the 
frenzied writings of his tortured mind amused 
the public. They did not see that he was 
being crucified. They thought his agonised 
words the fantastic mockeries of a man who 
had lost his temper on a gigantic scale ; and 
it was this that made them listen. It is all a 
very dark business. But we must try to put 
it all aside, and to stand if we can with the 
faithful few that stood helpless and distracted 
beside him in the hour of his agony, rather 
than with those that mocked him afar off, or 
that as they passed by reviled him. 



4 

And last of all I must say one word about 
his letters, because that is a very real province 
of literary art. We are past the time, and we 



I 






A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 257 

may be wholly thankful for it, when a man 
like Pope kept copies of his letters, improved 
them, added footnotes and introductions, and 
finally arranged that they should be stolen from 
him in a friendly manner and published without 
his supposed consent, and against his imagined 
wish, though he had prepared alike beforehand 
the theft and his own heart-broken protests. 
But we have had many fine letter-writers in 
England. To mention but a few, the letters of 
Gray are models of delicate taste, exquisite 
phrasing, and charming humour. The letters 
of Charles Lamb are notable for their tenderness, 
their good sense, and their delicious extravagance. 
The letters of Keats give the finest revelation I 
know of the glowing heart and mind of a young 
and splendid genius. The letters of FitzGerald 
are full of leisurely charm, gentle pathos, and 
keen discrimination. The letters of Carlyle have 
an intense and rugged glow, and a marvellous 
individuality of deeply-felt, contorted phrases, 
where the words are driven in gangs, like fettered 
slaves, to do their master's work. The letters 
of Mrs. Browning reveal a passion and a serious- 
ness that cannot fail to inspire and even to 
shame one's coldness. But I should put Ruskin 

R 



258 RUSKIN 

at the head of all. Like a great coinage of a 
king, every tiniest token bears his visible and 
noble imprint. All through his life, a part of 
his day's work was writing letters ; and he 
threw himself with his utmost force and his 
sensitive sympathy into the very mind and heart 
of his correspondent. I have said before how 
his letters to men of marked individuality bear 
unmistakable traces, in their words and phrases, 
of being transfused with the imagined thoughts 
of their recipients. And then, too, every smallest 
letter that he wrote was a part of himself. 
There are two large volumes of them in the 
big edition of his works, and there must be 
hundreds more in existence. Only the other 
day I stumbled upon a great collection of them, 
written to a girl whom he had never seen, and 
all growing out of one simple and sincere 
question which she had asked him. 

It was here that his extraordinary power of 
transition helped him. He could pass from 
simple gossip to deep pathos, from unaffected 
simplicity to pettish and extravagant censure, 
from caressing tenderness to poignant irony. 
He never said less or more than he thought 
and felt ; but the grace and beauty with which 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 259 

he invested it all, was born of no effort or 
taking thought ; it was simply himself. One 
of my hearers brought me the other day, after 
a lecture, a dozen letters of Ruskin's that he 
had picked up in a curiosity shop. There it 
was, that whimsical and solemn charm — a letter 
of almost heart-rending sorrow, speaking of his 
need for human affection, just salted at the 
end out of sentimentality by a pungent phrase 
of irony, in which he stood aside and smilingly 
surveyed his own dismay. Part of his mysterious 
attractiveness was that he could speak so frankly 
of himself and his failures, with such passionate 
sincerity, and then make light of it all, as the 
self-pity melted under humorous perception. 
There is plenty of bitterness, but no spite ; 
abundant pettishness, but not a trace of pettiness. 
Of course it is easy to call them egotistical ; 
and I do not attempt to deny that Ruskin took 
a deep interest in himself — we most of us do. 
But egotism is the taking oneself solemnly and 
seriously, with a gloomy and self-regarding 
pomposity, and Ruskin never did that. He 
was full of intense personal feeling, was pro- 
foundly convinced of the worth and significance 
of his message, sorrowed poignantly over his 



26o RUSKIN 

ineffectiveness, and the misguided way in which 
he was misinterpreted. But just when the 
shower is faUing heavily, till the world seems 
dissolved in wet, there comes a gleam of dancing 
sunshine with a tint of sapphire sky, which 
makes even the slanting rain beautiful, and 
dashes a gleam of gold upon drenched leaf and 
watery rut. I should do him wrong if I insisted 
too much upon his sorrow and heaviness, for 
there was a strain of real gaiety about him, 
which made him love all young and joyful and 
lighthearted things. I will read two or three 
of those letters in illustration of all this : — 

" I knew you would deeply feel the death of 
Dickens. It is very frightful to me — among the 
blows struck by the fates at worthy men, while all 
mischievous ones have ceaseless strength. The 
literary loss is infinite — the political one I care less 
for than you do. Dickens was a pure modernist — 
a leader of the steam-whistle party par excellence 
— and he had no understanding of any power of 
antiquity except a sort of jackdaw sentiment for 
cathedral towers. He knew nothing of the nobler 
power of superstition — was essentially a stage 
manager, and used everything for effect on the pit. 
His Christmas meant mistletoe and pudding — 
neither resurrection from dead, nor rising of new 
stars, nor teaching of wise men, nor shepherds. 



I 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 261 

His hero is essentially the ironmaster ; in spite of 
Hard Times, he has advanced by his influence every 
principle that makes them harder — the love of 
excitement, in all classes, and the fury of business 
competition, and the distrust both of nobility and 
clergy which, wide enough and fatal enough, and 
too justly founded, needed no apostle to the mob, 
but a grave teacher of priests and nobles them- 
selves, from whom Dickens had essentially no 
word. ..." 

And again : — 

"[The letters] of Emerson and Carlyle came to 
me about a week since, and I am nearly through 
them, grateful heartily for the book, and the master- 
ful index ; but much disappointed at having no 
word of epitaph from yourself on both the men. 

" The Emerson letters are infinitely sweet and 
wise : here and there, as in p. 30, vol. ii., unintelli- 
gible to me. C.'s., like all the words of him pub- 
lished since his death, have vexed me, and partly 
angered, with their perpetual me miserum — never 
seeming to feel the extreme ill manners of this 
perpetual whine ; and, to what one dares not call 
an affected, but a quite unconsciously false extent, 
hiding the more or less of pleasure which a strong 
man must have in using his strength, be it but in 
heaving aside dust-heaps. 

" What in my own personal way 1 chiefly regret 
and wonder at in him is, the perception in all 
nature of nothing between the stars and his 
stomach — his going, for instance, into North 



262 RUSKIN 

Wales for two months, and noting absolutely no 
Cambrian thing or event, but only increase of 
Carlylian bile. 

" Not that I am with you in thinking Froude 
wrong about the Reminiscences. They are to me 
full of his strong insight, and in their distress, far 
more pathetic than these bowlings of his earlier 
life about Cromwell and others of his quite best 
works ; but I am vexed for want of a proper 
Epilogue of your own. . . . 

*< How much better right than C. have I to say, 
'Ay demi'?" 

I will only say one word in conclusion. I 
would not persuade any one to try and write like 
Ruskin, though he was probably the greatest 
master of English prose, in his variety, his 
copiousness, the lucidity and the perennial 
beauty of his expression ; but just as one cannot 
live by bread alone, one cannot write by imitation. 
It is a very elementary literary exercise to parody 
a style, and Ruskin lends himself easily to parody. 
Indeed his style is so contagious that if one 
reads him much and attentively, one finds it hard 
not to write like him ; like him, I say, yet ah, how 
far away ! But every writer must find his own 
method of expression, and no man can look his 
best in borrowed clothes. The curvature of the 
owner hangs indelibly about them. 



A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 263 

But on the other hand, as I have tried to show, 
there are few writers of whom the word great 
can be used so incontestably. While other writers 
have been hke performers in a great orchestra, 
spouting melody from a silver-mouthed trumpet, 
or drawing out the thrill and shiver of the tense 
string, Ruskin seems to me like a great organist, 
manipulating and combining and hushing the 
huge house of sound, with its myriad pipes and 
ranked ingenuities. There is no writer — and this 
is, I humbly believe, the end and crown of art — 
who could express so perfectly, so sweetly, so 
truly, the thought that rose swiftly and burningly 
in his mind. He could flash out, with a deft turn 
of his wrist, a stop of shrill emotion, and keep a 
dozen moods all in full play at once, combining 
and eluding and charming, in a sequence at once 
orderly and profound. We may read Ruskin then 
primarily for the glow and beauty that he casts on 
life ; but not forget that half that thought must 
have been dumb, its deepest feeling and its lightest 
grace unuttered, if it had not been for the art 
which, through endless labour, widest sympathy, 
and sternest purpose, gave him the power to 
tell his secret so that all can understand. These 
are the two conditions of art ; that a man should 



264 RUSKIN 

have something in him that is worth telling 
and making plain ; and after that that he should 
spare no trouble, despise no criticism, and yet 
be disheartened by no rebuke, from saying the 
thoughts of his heart as calmly, as clearly, and 
as expressively as he can. 



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Magazine is usually successful 
in getting together a number of 
anecdotal literary articles. ' 

Guardian. 

• The counsel of perfection is to 
purchase the Cornhill, that you 
may not only enjoy its contents 
but keep them to show a friend.' 



OPINIONS OP PUBLIC 
LIBRARIANS. 

Arbroath. 

' My Committee are of opinion 
that there is room for one of its 
kind. (Personally, I think there 
is only one of the Cornhill kind, 
and that is the Cornhill itself.) 
I may say at once that the Corn- 
kill exactly meets the wants of 
a select body of readers. ' 

Hampstead. 

• I find upon inquiry at our five 
Libraries that the Cornhill is 
well read, and certainly it appeals 
to a section of readers who can 
appreciate better literary fare than 
is offered in most of the modern 
monthlies. May I take this op- 
portunity of expressing my own 
admiration for the high literary 
tone which you preserve in the 
Cornhill.' 

Kinross. 

' The magazine is much appre- i 
ciated by our better-class readers 
and is well read. ' 



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